School News

 

Introducing Our New PSF Chair, Alyse Garabelli!

February 9th, 2024

We are delighted to welcome Alyse Garabelli as our new PSF Chair! Alyse has been enthusiastically serving the Trinitas community in a wide variety of ways (for which our staff is very grateful) since she and her family joined Trinitas. 

Here’s a message from Alyse: 

My husband, Mike, and I have two children at Trinitas: Dominic in first grade and Vincent in second. Outside the home, I have the great pleasure of working for Our Daily Bread University (part of Our Daily Bread Ministries). Apart from that, things that excite me are reading with my family, learning more about classical Christian education, and Detroit Lions football! Our family joined Trinitas two and a half years ago when Vincent started Kindergarten and we have been incredibly blessed by the community and friendships we’ve found here. I’m particularly grateful for how warm and welcoming the community has been, and that kind of welcome is something I’m motivated to share with others. I’m excited and thankful for this opportunity to serve as PSF Chair! 


Lending Library — Lots of Loans Available!

February 2nd, 2024

The Trinitas Little Lending Library is a great source for Thoughtful Reader reading. Visit the media center and choose a good book today! Reading logs are available in the office. Be sure to turn them in to a teacher or Mrs. Mouw for a chance to make it onto our new bookshelf bulletin board! 


Notae Latinae: “Euge” for MJCL! (Euge = Hurrah!)

February 2nd, 2024

The Michigan Junior Classical League spring conference (a.k.a. “MJCL”) is a fun day that brings together Latin students from across the state! The day features workshops, academic skills tests, and some competitive events (e.g., oratory, visual art, Olympika games, Latin quiz bowl, costume contest). Students in grades 6 through 8 are eligible to attend. Several parent drivers/chaperones will be needed as this year’s conference is on Saturday, March 23. The cost for families is $10 per student. (Trinitas is paying the rest of the $25 conference fee in addition to providing a team t-shirt.) Lunch is included.  

The sign-up forms that went home with students earlier this week must be returned by Wednesday, February 14. 

It has become a tradition to send off our MJCL team with a parking lot pep rally ahead of dismissal. Please plan to attend this year’s rally on Friday, March 22, at 2:30 p.m. 


Artist Spotlight — Da Vinci

February 2nd, 2024

Our new artist of the quarter is Leonardo da Vinci. On Monday, students learned about some of da Vinci’s many creations—from paintings to sculptures to crazy inventions! As our young artists learned, he was notorious for beginning projects without ever finishing them. One such project was a massive equestrian statue commissioned by the duke of Milan. Due to the constraints of the technology of his day, da Vinci was not able to successfully cast a bronze figure of such amazing size. Five centuries later, however, the artist Nina Akamu brought da Vinci’s idea to life by creating a massive statue which now resides in the Frederick Meijer Gardens, right here in Grand Rapids  


High School Exploration Committee

February 2nd, 2024

The Trinitas School Board is pleased to announce the creation of a High School Exploration Committee. In the coming months, the committee will be seeking your feedback about interest in developing a high school option for Trinitas students. The committee will also be gathering information about the costs, opportunities, and time frames associated with different expansion options. Please join us in prayer for the work of the committee, and be on the lookout for an interest survey in the coming weeks. If you have questions in the meantime, feel free to contact committee chair Austin Hakes.


CCE Corner – How and For What Are We Formed?

January 31st, 2024

Formation is at the heart of classical Christian education. This is no small task. As James K.A. Smith observes in You Are What You Love, we are daily being formed by participation, often unintentional, in ubiquitous secular liturgies. Many of those liturgies are making the work of educators and parents more difficult. We believe classical Christian classrooms and homes can and should be spaces for intentional and powerful counter liturgies and formation. We encourage you to listen to Restless Devices: Christian Formation in a Digital World, a Calvin University January Series talk by Felicia Wu Song. Join us as we practice liturgies designed to form us, not for “permanent connectivity” through devices, but rather for permanent communion through Christ.


Annual Fund Gratitude – Happy New Year!

January 12th, 2024

God is good! Thank you for making our annual fund a success. I am very excited to announce that we surpassed our goal of $90,000 by receiving gifts of just over $130,000. This is such a blessing and we praise God for his provision and thank you for your faithful prayers and generous donations! Each of you is a blessing to us. 

Thank you for being part of our mission as we cultivate lives of Faith, Reason, and Virtue. 

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:20–21 

From all of the students, staff, and board members of Trinitas, thank you for your partnership! 

Mark Wagner, Headmaster 


CCE Corner — Light and Life to All He Brings: An Epiphany Meditation

January 11th, 2024

We welcome Mrs. Tellinghuisen back to the CCE Corner. This reflection for Epiphany was written last year for her church, Fifth Reformed, where she serves as a liturgical consultant and writer.

“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is not just a festive song about some extravagant (yet impractical) gift giving. They are days of the true Christmas season: the liturgical season of Christmastide, which brings us to Epiphany (January 6, by the calendar, with Epiphany Sunday celebrated on the 6th or the Sunday following it), and the beginning of Ordinary Time, the period before Lent.

Epiphany commemorates the visit of the Magi and the manifestation of the Light of the World to all those in the world. (The word comes from a Greek word meaning manifestation or appearance.) The kings are individual characters, uniquely situated in time and history, but they are representative of the Gentiles and the truth that salvation through Jesus is available to all. The Gift came to us all because God loves us all.

Read the rest of the meditation as featured in the Reformed Worship blog.

© RRT


Field Trip Recap for Grades 1 & 2

December 15th, 2023

On Monday, the first and second grade classes visited Our Daily Bread Ministries. Students toured the global headquarters where they received demonstrations in the radio/podcast and video recording studios and learned how the Our Daily Bread devotional goes from writer to reader. This included watching the printing presses hard at work to print 55,000 devotionals per hour! Our students were a delight to the Our Daily Bread Ministries employees, who mentioned how sociable the students were; the Senior Audio Media Producer commented, “What a fun and well-behaved group! It was the high point of the day having their company in the studio.” Thank you to all the parents who helped drive and chaperone for this field trip! 


CCE Corner — Trinitas Storytelling

December 7th, 2023

In C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, a terrifying chase by lions ends with two horses and two children barely escaping across a narrow inlet of the sea. As the four gather their wits, Bree, a talking Narnian horse, lays out the plan: “And now that we’ve got the water between us and those dreadful animals, what about you two humans taking off our saddles and our all having a rest and hearing one another’s stories.” Bree asks one of the humans to speak first, and the narrator tells us: “Aravis immediately began, sitting quite still and using a rather different tone and style from her usual one. For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”*

It’s a humorous comparison of genres but one that might make those of us in classical education a little defensive. A philosopher by training, I feel the need to explain, “Well, joking aside, Lewis actually thought essays were important and interesting too…” We shouldn’t be quick to set aside Lewis’s primary point though: stories are powerful. They grab our attention, engage the imagination, arouse emotions, direct passions, shape beliefs. In short, they form us. While it is important to train students in logic and analytical reading and writing, we have to admit that stories are important too—probably more important. As Jennifer Holberg writes in Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story to Shape our Faith, “[N]o matter what one’s childhood—even if one was not or is not really much of a reader—we are all profoundly story-shaped people. We live in a world that, for better or worse, most often seems to process through narrative, not facts.”** Trinitas is a school built on stories—on God’s story, and on the myriad stories that point us to Him.

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