Head of School Feb 2, 2024
Dear Seven Hills Families,
This past weekend featured two special events that have rapidly become important milestones on our extracurricular calendar.
Last Saturday, Seven Hills hosted its annual Certamen competition. Organized by Latin teachers Marcie Handler and Katie Swinford, ably assisted by a group of student volunteers from our own Middle and Upper Schools, this year’s contest attracted more than 60 Middle and Upper School students from 10 schools in the Cincinnati area. Sponsored by the National Junior Classical League, Certamen is a quiz-bowl style game for students of Latin, Greek, and classical civilizations. It allows students to demonstrate their knowledge of the ancient peoples, languages, and cultures, and the relationships between those topics and the modern world. It is always a treat to watch these eager students as they display their deep knowledge of arcane points of grammar, Roman history, or classical mythology, often buzzing in to supply thoughtful answers based on the most obscure and tenuous of clues.
On Sunday, under the guidance of Middle School science teacher Ken Revell, 50 seventh and eighth grade student volunteers mounted our annual STEAM Fair to help our Lower School students learn more about science and technology. In our fabulous new Middle School building, the students set up 21 exploration stations through which the Lower School students and their families could circulate to conduct scientific experiments and/or demonstrations.
Guided by their Middle School “instructors,” approximately 150 Lower School students circulated, with their families, to explore several key scientific concepts. To help them understand Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy, students could “Build a Boat,” testing different-sized sheets of aluminum foil to determine which design would float the greatest weight (the most pennies). Elsewhere, they used a vacuum chamber to study the impact of changes in air pressure on the volume of balloons and marshmallows or fired “film canister rockets” powered by air pressure pumps. To explore the concept of “a center of gravity,” they threaded the neck of a filled two-liter soda bottle through a hole in a plywood board, pitched at a 45-degree angle, and then balanced a weighted model bird with only its beak resting on the apex of a pyramid. To learn more about electricity, they explored “insulators and conductors,” built “squishy circuits,” made rudimentary electroscopes, and fashioned battery-powered “circuit jewelry,” festooned with lights connected to conductive tape.
As the Lower School students moved from station to station, they learned about acids and bases, polarity, capillary action, chromatography, color and light, and how the eye works, and they filled their “passports” with colored stamps to demonstrate their exposure to each of the topics.
It’s hard to describe fully the excitement this experience engendered both for the learners and, perhaps even more so, for the young teachers. It’s an old saw that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Watching our Middle Schoolers eagerly conveying these concepts to these highly engaged younger students certainly illustrated that principle.
Many thanks to all the teachers and student volunteers who worked so hard to create both of these engaging learning opportunities for our students.
Christopher P. Garten
Head of School
Key Dates & Events
February — Black History Month
Wednesday, Feb. 7 — Parent Community Board Meeting, 8:30 a.m.
Friday, Feb. 16 — Faculty Professional Development Day. No Classes.
Monday, Feb. 19 — Presidents Day. No School. All buildings and offices are closed.
Wednesday, Feb. 21 — Board of Trustees Meeting, 6:30 p.m.