School news: Hands-on learning

Glen Forest Elementary School fifth-graders pose as famous scientists during an interactive science fair.

School News is an occasional series highlighting information and photos from Fairfax County Public Schools and other sources.


Partners of the Year – The Foundation for Public Schools is hosting its annual State of Education luncheon on Nov. 27 at the Falls Church Marriott Fairview Park. The foundation will recognize the FCPS business, community, and workforce development partners of the year. There are 15 finalists.

Baileys students plant cherry trees.

The keynote speaker, J. Stephen Jones, the new CEO of Inova, will talk about the intersection of education and workforce development and his plans for Inova.
Luncheon tickets and sponsorships are available online. Proceeds from the luncheon support the foundation’s Soar Teacher Grant program.

Cherry trees – The National Cherry Blossom Tree Planting Project and All Nippon Airways donated five cherry trees to Bailey’s Elementary School.

At the planting ceremony, representatives from those organizations joined students and staff for student performances and showed students how to care for the trees. First-graders performed a dance routine called “From Seed to Tree,” and second-graders performed the traditional Japanese song “Sakura.”

A big anniversary – Falls Church High School will be celebrating its 75th anniversary in June 2020.

The school has a complicated history. As the student body of Jefferson High School prepared to become Falls Church High School in the spring of 1945, juniors and seniors voted to keep the Jaguars as a mascot, FCPS reports. The name of the school newspaper, the Jaguar Journal, was also retained but was renamed Jagwire in 2004.

After opening its new building for the start of the 1945-46 school year, Falls Church High School served grades 8-12. The current building, constructed in 1959, was originally called John Greenleaf Whittier Intermediate School.

Rotary Club members bring free dictionaries to Glen Forest Elementary School.

In the fall of 1967, Whittier Intermediate and Falls Church High School swapped buildings and FCHS’s current building on Jaguar Trail was doubled in size due to increased enrollment from the Baby Boomer generation.

Free dictionaries – The Bailey’s Crossroads Rotary Club distributed more than 450 dictionaries to third-graders at Parklawn, Glen Forest, and Bailey’s Upper elementary schools Nov. 7.

Rotarians visited each classroom to hand out the dictionaries. They pointed out features of the books including the longest word and the list of presidents. The Rotary Club has been doing this for years, with the goal of ensuring students have their own personal dictionary to use through elementary and middle school.

Egyptian village – The Architecture in the Schools program brought professional architects to Wakefield Forest Elementary School to help third-graders construct a scaled Nile River map model using what the students learned about ancient Egyptian history and art.

An architect works with students at Wakefield Forest Elementary School.

The architects introduced the students to 2D drawings, beginning with sketches and moving to plans, sections, and elevations; taught them about Egyptian residential architecture; and helped them create blueprints and model homes from clay. The students also built pyramids, obelisks, the Sphinx, and a pharaoh’s Nile barge. The model will be displayed at the Washington Architecture Foundation in December.