Curriculum Guide: CONNECT

At Phillips Brooks School, we value opportunities to bring our community together and engage intellectually on interdisciplinary topics. One way that we put this value to practice is called CONNECT.

Every Friday, PBS classroom and specialist teachers team up to explore a variety of topics and projects inspired by the students’ interests or extensions of curriculum. Each specialist connects with a certain grade level for about a month of Fridays in a row.

CONNECT provides time for teacher and specialist collaboration, which often turns into cross-curricular projects, learning opportunities in smaller groups, and more in-depth conversations and experiences. This part of our program has quickly become a student favorite that has students wondering aloud who they will be collaborating with come Friday.

Projects have included cooking, outdoor education field trips, service learning projects, science and technology experiments, and performances. In one particularly awesome project, the 1st-grade team collaborated with our librarian to create a traveling wax museum of important historical figures of the students’ choosing. PBS students brought their wax museum to the Menlo Park library and performed their monologues for the public.