Friends Seminary

Student Spotlight 🔆 For Eli ’26 and Ian ’26, service has become one way to understand what community means in practice.

As seniors and leaders of the Upper School Student Service Committee, both students have spent the past three years helping classmates find meaningful ways to take part in service. At Friends, Upper School students complete service hours as part of their Upper School experience, and the committee helps make sure students have regular, accessible opportunities to contribute throughout the year. The Committee is responsible for organizing drives, setting up letter-writing events, choosing nonprofits, counting donations, and finding moments in the school year when students might be ready to give their time or attention.

This year, Eli and Ian helped the Committee become more visible in the daily life of the Upper School. Through grade representatives, students brought forward ideas from their classmates and helped shape service projects that reflected student interest, current events, and community needs.

Read more: https://www.friendsseminary.org/News-Detail-2?pk=1679590

This week’s Senior Project Fair offered a glimpse into the range of questions, experiments, and creative work the Class of 2026 has been pursuing this spring.

Projects moved across disciplines: creating biodegradable plastic from scratch, building a muscle-powered robotic arm, examining imaginary numbers, studying sustainability in fashion, composing jazz and rock, exploring neighborhood design, looking at New York City through its parks, and asking hard historical questions about feminism, accountability, and public memory.

Together, the fair showed how Senior Project gives students room to follow a real question with focus and independence, whether that work begins in a lab, archive, studio, neighborhood, or community partnership. Senior Project presentations will take place June 1-2.

For eleven years, Amy Smith has been a beloved presence in the Friends community, teaching Upper School mathematics with a rare blend of rigor, humor, and heart. Students describe her not only as an exceptional teacher, but as someone who makes them feel deeply supported and capable of success. Whether through her detailed class notes, encouraging check-ins, or infectious enthusiasm, Amy creates classrooms where students feel comfortable taking risks and persisting through challenges. Beyond the classroom, her positivity, generosity, and collaborative spirit have made a lasting impact on colleagues and the broader school culture. Read more about the care, joy, and dedication Amy brings to Friends each day. To read the full story visit the link in our bio.

On May 15, students from Barry Blumenfeld’s second and third grade dance classes performed original dances for their peers and parents at the annual Lower School Dance Assembly. The dancer-choreographers in Grade 2 spent the year studying the works of famous modern dance choreographers as well as dance notation created by Rudolf Laban. The symbols were used to identify specific movements in each choreographer’s work, and then the students choreographed dances inspired by what they learned.

In third grade students continued learning about dance notation and dance literacy, incorporating new symbols through the lens of the African American experience. In a unit created by Adia Whitaker, third graders learned about the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman. They also learned about the Ashanti people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast (where Tubman’s ancestors lived) and their Adinkra symbols as well as symbols used in the Underground Railroad Quilt Code. Inspired by these stories and symbols, and using the formation of the Big Dipper (which points to the North Star, symbolizing freedom), students created and shared their original dances.

Friends was pleased to welcome Upper School visual arts students from The Clinton School to Leading: The James Turrell Skyspace last Thursday.

During their visit, students learned more about James Turrell’s work, his use of light as a medium, and the Quaker traditions of silence and reflection that inform the experience of the Skyspace. The visit invited students to slow down, look closely, and consider how light, color, and perception shift over time.

Last week, Grade 6 Arabic students visited The Met with Joseph and Mouna to explore the Art of the Arab Lands permanent collection as part of their unit on art in the Arab World. Students deciphered calligraphy on the walls of the famed Met mihrab, reconstructed the geometric patterns of zellige tiles, and admired the splendid Damascus Room, a replica of the traditional space where Syrian families entertain their guests.

This spring, Grade 8 traveled to Washington, D.C. for a new overnight trip that extended classroom learning into the cultural, historical, and civic spaces of the nation’s capital.
Joined by their advisors and Michelle Cristella, Head of Middle School, students visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the U.S. Capitol, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and several Smithsonian museums. They also explored major memorials on the National Mall, including the Jefferson, FDR, Martin Luther King Jr., Lincoln, Vietnam Veterans, and Korean War memorials.

Across the trip, students were asked to consider how history is remembered, how public spaces tell national stories, and how civic institutions shape the lives of individuals and communities. These questions connected to their Middle School coursework while also reflecting the School’s core values: truth-seeking, equality, service, and the responsibility to act with integrity in the wider world.

The trip also included a service project with So Others Might Eat, known as SOME, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to help break the cycle of poverty and homelessness. SOME provides food, affordable housing, healthcare, workforce development, and supportive services for individuals and families in the District. Through this partnership, students connected their study of history and civic responsibility with direct service to a local community.

Coming near the end of Grade 8, the trip gave students time to learn beyond the classroom, reflect on justice and responsibility, and be together as a grade before moving into Upper School.

Banana Splits has marked 35 years at Friends.

For more than three decades, Banana Splits has offered students a voluntary, school-based affinity and identity space for children and teens whose family structures include separation, divorce, the death of a parent, or single parenting by choice.

The group gives students a place to know they are not alone, to hear how others move through similar experiences, and to support one another in honest, age-appropriate ways.
To celebrate this milestone year, students across divisions gathered for the annual K–12 Banana Splits Picnic in the Outer Courtyard, with pizza, refreshments, and, of course, make-your-own banana splits among classmates and friends who participate in the program.

With gratitude to this year’s Banana Splits group facilitators — Samantha Meltzer, Deidre Edwards, Monica Kaplan, Jennifer Wittmer, Jessica Contreras, Marcus Leslie, Megan Fenstermaker, and Trent Williams — and to every student who participated this year. Thank you for making this space possible.

On Friday, May 15, Upper School Latin students gathered in the Library for the annual Latin Colloquium, a longstanding program that asks Upper Schoolers to treat Latin not as a closed subject, but as a language still capable of raising urgent questions about power, identity, love, ambition, exile, and social responsibility.

The theme of this year’s Colloquium, “The World We Live In,” reflected the range of work on display. Latin V students moved between close reading, translation, visual interpretation, original composition, performance, and design. Their projects showed the community how Roman literature can still speak to modern concerns, not because the ancient world offers easy answers, but because its texts are full of contradiction, beauty, cruelty, humor, and human complexity.

Presentations included work on Roman elegy and modern music, audience interpretation, emotional regulation, the representation of nature in Roman art, the control of the puella in Roman elegy, and the ways ancient texts construct power, gender, voice, and selfhood. Students paired Latin passages from writers such as Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Pliny with visual art, modern references, creative media, and original analysis, asking what these works reveal about the worlds that produced them and what they continue to reveal now.

Their culminating projects reflected the heart of the Colloquium: serious scholarship made public. Students were asked not only to translate or analyze Latin texts, but to make arguments, explain their choices, and enter into conversation with an audience. The program, which Dr. Christel Johnson, Chair of the World Languages Department, introduced in 2007, is a way to elevate student learning and give them an experience modeled on collegiate academic forums.

Grade 2 students recently completed their Mock Caldecott competition after several months of diligent evaluation in a process inspired by the Caldecott Medal. The Caldecott Medal is an American Library Association book award for the most distinguished American picture book for children published each year, selected by a group of librarians using a defined set of criteria.

After reading past winners and unpacking the Caldecott criteria, Grade 2 students read and evaluated ten picture books published in 2025. Students used visual and critical literacy skills to assess each book using the criteria, exploring elements both concrete and subjective: Is this a picture book? Does it demonstrate excellent artistic technique? Does the style of the illustrations fit the story being told? Do the images contribute to the telling of that story? Friends took notes, drew favorite images, and voted for the books they felt were most deserving of acknowledgement.

Lower Schoolers selected two honor books and one Mock Caldecott winner. The winner is Stalactite and Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave by Drew Beckmeyer.

The honor books are Don’t Trust Fish by Neil Sharpson and Dan Santat and Broken by X. Fang. Grade 2 then gathered earlier this month to announce and celebrate the results.