Newsletter  

Winter 2005

In This Issue

• Autumn Concert
• Saturnalia
• Literature Day
• Arithmetic Week
• Headmaster's Latin Exam
• Geography Bee

Autumn Concert

This November, PLA held its annual Autumn concert on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The performance included songs, instrumental pieces and short readings. An excerpt from Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day proclamation was read, as were short sections from speeches made by our founding fathers and Nation’s great patriots. The program concluded with the traditional Thanksgiving hymn, We Gather Together.

Literature Day

On the Monday after Thanksgiving recess, the students at PLA participated in Literature Day. In the morning, each class was assigned a specific literary genre: poetry, novels, plays, epics, etc. and a list of major works and authors within it. Then, it was then up to each class to design a visual presentation for their genre. Some classes created large timelines on rolls of paper, others chose to focus on the authors’ lives, and still others on the major works within their category.

Arithmetic Week

For the last full week before Thanksgiving vacation, Princeton Latin and Princeton Science Academy students spent each day doing arithmetic drills. Starting with addition fact sheets, each child solved up to forty problems a sheet. When they completed a sheet, a teacher corrected it and handed the student another worksheet. The upper-class students were able to complete over twenty different sheets that included operations on whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percents.

Saturnalia

4th-grader Christopher Iorio, neatly dressed as Frosty and crowned with the headmaster’s own hat, helped to usher in the winter holidays this year as part of the School’s annual Saturnalia program. The performance, which was held on December 16th, ranged from the light-hearted to the solemn with readings and carols representing winter feast days from various cultures throughout history.

Each year, the performance begins with a reading from Plato and goes on to include readings for St. Nicholas Day, Santa Lucia, Saturnalia, Hanukkah, Christmas, Epiphany and others. Interspersed among the readings are festive carols. Highlights from this year’s performance included a Greek, Latin and English reading of the prologue to St. John’s Gospel, which was undertaken by Melissa Iorio (7th), Robert Recine (7th) and Dylan Hume (6th).

The performance is named after the ancient Roman holiday, Saturnalia. Celebrated by the Romans from December 17-23, feasts were held in honor of Saturn, the god of the harvest.

Geography Bee

This year's annual National Geographic Geography Bee winner was the Zeno's very own Matthew Sullivan. Kevin Miller, a Lucan, came in a close second.

Headmaster's Latin Exam

This December, all of the students took part in the annual Headmaster's Latin Exam. The exam covers all of the vocabulary in the students' Latin book chapter by chapter. If a 6th-grader has studied 30 chapters, then the exam will include all of the vocabulary from those chapters. Although the test is lengthy, it has the advantage of being completely predictable and therefore completely conquerable!