Strength in Collaboration: The DK-4th Lunar New Year Dragon
Strength in Collaboration: The DK-4th Lunar New Year Dragon
As lower school art teachers at The Willows, Kristy Acero & Christian Isbell are no strangers to big ideas. It’s common for them to incorporate curricular lessons into ideas for thoughtful and detailed student art projects, transforming them into artistic prompts for a wide variety of classes. With these prompts. students often explore visual meaning through their own individual perspectives. However, more recently, Kristy & Christian shared an idea to celebrate Lunar New Year, not as individuals, but as a collective Willows community.
With it being the Year of the Dragon, Acero & Isbell lead DK-4th grade in a large-scale, collaborative project, with each grade creating a portion of a 3-D realistic dragon. Spanning close to 50 feet in length, the dragon is a definitive example of a team effort, with each grade contributing to the larger goal. Currently displayed in the Building 1 hallway, the dragon serves as a reminder of the collective strength of our community, and how the sky's the limit when we work together. Learn more about the creative process and construction of the dragon in the video below!
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At The Willows, learning is a lifelong journey that extends beyond our classrooms and into every part of our community. Just as we nurture curiosity and creativity in our students, we also invest deeply in the growth of our teachers. One way this commitment comes to life is through our teacher mentoring program, which pairs educators with faculty members to foster collaboration, confidence, and professional fulfillment.
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We are proud to share that The Willows Community School has been recognized by The Hollywood Reporter as one of Los Angeles’ Best Private Schools. For The Willows, this recognition reflects our long-standing commitment to a balanced yet demanding progressive education rooted in experiential learning and social values.
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The Willows community is seeing science come to life, quite literally in the air around us. Thanks to funds raised during last year’s Jog-a-Thon, we have purchased a professional-grade weather station, the Davis Vantage Pro 2. This new device is more than just an exciting gadget, but a learning tool that constantly updates and deepens our integrated science curriculum, empowering students to explore our environment and climate through real data, observation, and discovery.
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For the past decade, The Willows’ implementation of the RULER Approach has not only transformed how our students learn, but how our entire community understands, expresses, and values emotions. We recognize that emotions matter, and that healthy emotional regulation plays a vital piece in helping to cultivate children’s minds.
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The Willows school-wide theme for the 2025-2026 school year is Struggle. Each day, we challenge students to uncover meaning and significance in the world around them and emphasize independence and courage in risk-taking. One of the most powerful ways children develop these skills is through something many of us instinctively want to protect them from: struggle.