Welcome to the start of your journey with Origins High School!
It is with joy and excitement that we welcome our founding class to the 2013-2014 school year.
Teachers and administrators are hard at work this summer laying the foundation for what will
be an exciting journey and partnership with students and families. Ensuring that the high
school experience will be rich, vibrant, and thoughtful is at the forefront of our planning
process. Building meaningful and lasting relationships between students, families, teachers, and
community members drives our professional mission, and we look forward to meeting and
getting to know each of you.
Our primary responsibility is student learning and offering all students the educational and
artistic opportunities that will maximize their potential and prepare them for higher learning
and demanding careers. Origins’ mission is to nurture and develop students as problem-solvers
and flexible thinkers, individuals who have mastered the process and motivation necessary to
attain success through today’s constantly evolving educational expectations. Through the
school’s personalized college and career goal-setting program, students learn how to create
long-term goals and achieve them through immediate concrete actions and study.
Today’s world demands students who think critically and respond efficiently to a host of
scenarios. Our daily instruction will provide opportunities for scholars to engage in thoughtful
discussions and project-based learning activities, molding and challenging the status quo. Each
student’s well-rounded education will include a unique combination of rigorous academic
standards and achievement in an inviting school culture. The students of Origins High School
will be provided with numerous opportunities to be challenged as they learn and grow through
foreign language courses, advanced placement courses, and a host of specialized electives,
including planned internships.
Please plan to join us for one of our building tours. We are excited to show you our location
and amazing facilities. Tours will take place on:


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August 5 from 1:30 - 2:30 pm
August 9 from 1:30 - 2:30 pm
August 12 from 1:30 - 2:30 pm
Kindly RSVP for a tour date by August 3 by calling (718) 935-3643 or send us an email
at origins@orginshighschool.org.
The Origins community also looks forward to meeting your family at our community
orientation on:

August 28 from 7:30-8:30 pm at the King’s Bay Y, located at 3495 Nostrand Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11229.
As teachers and students meet and connect over light refreshments, more information will be
given regarding our school dress policy, schedule, supplies, course offerings, community-based
partnerships and more.
Kindly RSVP for orientation by August 26 by calling (718) 935-3643 or send us an email
at origins@orginshighschool.org.
Also in this mailing, you will find introductory summer assignments and a family survey. The
academic activities are due on September 9th and will also be posted on our website, for your
convenience. You may email us your family surveys or bring them with you to a tour or
orientation. Please feel free to email us with any clarifying questions or concerns.
One of our greatest strengths is the pride and support from our community, and our parents
are critical contributors to the success of our students. Your involvement is always welcomed
and encouraged as we work to provide the best possible education to the students of the
Origins community. I encourage you to contact me with your ideas, questions, and suggestions.
Regards,
John Banks (Principal) and the Origins Learning Community
Student /Family Survey
Name of Student (Last, First): ____________________________________________________
Previous School: _______________________________________________________________
Student Email Address:__________________________________________________________
Student Cell Number:___________________________________________________________
Parent/Guardian Name: ________________________________________________________
Relationship:__________________________________________________________________
Home Address: _______________________________________________________________
Home Telephone Number:__________________________ Cell Number:________________
Parent/Guardian Email Address:__________________________________________________
Best method of communication:__________________________ Preferred Time:__________
What is the primary language spoken at home? _____________________________________
How will your child travel to and from school?_____________________________________
Does your child have any allergies or major health concerns?
_____________________________________________________________________________
How can Origins High School support the needs of your family (i.e. specific workshops,
trainings)?
English Language Arts Activity
The past two decades have been filled with many inventions and advancements in the
artistic, technological, economical and environmental fields. These advancements have
helped to improve our quality of life, simplify daily tasks and allow society to function in
a more productive way.
As citizens of the 21st century, select the invention you believe was the most influential
over the past 20 years. Provide information about the inventor(s), the different phases
during the invention process and how the invention has transformed society on a local
and global scale. Be sure to describe the ways in which this invention has impacted your
life.
This writing activity should be written neatly or typed on a separate sheet of paper and
contain 3-5 paragraphs. Be sure to check for spelling and grammatical errors. List or
cite 3 sources used while conducting your research.
The activity will be collected on Monday, September 9, 2013
Summer Reading List
Spend some quality time this summer engaged in a good book!
Listed below are suggested readings for the summer. Select and read at least one
book from the following list of titles:
Make Lemonade- Virginia Euwer Wolff
Brave New World-Aldous Huxley
The Old Man and the Sea- Ernest Hemingway
Twisted- Laurie Halse Anderson
The Hoopster- Alan Lawrence Sitomer
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn- Betty Smith
The Life of Pi- Yann Martel
Money Hungry- Sharon Flake
Slam! - Walter Dean Myers
How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous- Georgia Bragg
Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Authors- Megan Kelley Hall
The Year We Disappeared- Cylin Busby
The Disenchantments- Nina LaCour
The first unit of English Language Arts will focus around the theme of
“Self Discovery”.
As you prepare to explore this topic, also read one of the following titles:
Into The Wild- John Krakauer
Speak- Laurie Halse Anderson
When I Was Puerto Rican- Esmeralda Santiago
New York City Art Gallery/Museum Study
The Big Apple is filled with opportunities to explore the arts, whether it is taking dance classes,
visiting Broadway or going on a nature walk. This summer, take full advantage of the various
cultural institutions around New York City and its surrounding boroughs and complete the
following museum study.
Visit an art gallery or museum this summer (many are free of charge!), locate a piece of work
you find interesting and answer the following questions on a separate sheet of paper.
Name of gallery/museum:
Title of work:
Name of Artist:
Year or time period the work was created:
How is the work represented (realistic, idealized, naturalistic, stylized, abstract, nonrepresentational, etc.)?
Is this a large or a small work? Does the size affect the impression this work made on you?
What kind of texture does the work have? Is it rough, smooth, etc.?
Describe the work of art. Attempt to create a written illustration of the work using descriptive
language (color, shape, materials used, dimension {2-D, 3-D}).
Artifact Analysis
Your 9th grade global studies will take you from the ruins in Ancient Egypt to the mighty
Chinese dynasties. This summer, visit any museum in NYC (suggestions given on the
following page), and select a GLOBAL artifact to study and describe. Please ensure that your
artifact is not from the United States, rather, it was discovered or created abroad. Answer the
questions below.
Name of museum visited:
1. Title of Artifact:
2. Artist (if known):
3. What do you see? (list as many specific observations about your artifact as possible)
4. What questions do you have after looking at the artifact?
5. What event/person/moment in time do you think this artifact tells the story of? How do
you know, using prior knowledge?
6. What conclusions can you draw about this period of global studies based on this artifact?
7. In the space below, sketch what you see. You can either choose to make a sketch of the
entire artifact or of a specific part that attracts your attention. Include as much detail as
possible.
List of Possible Museum Choices
•
American Museum of Natural History
Located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City is one of the largest and most
celebrated museums in the world. Located in park-like grounds across the street from Central
Park, the museum complex contains 27 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent
exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain
over 32 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, and human
cultural artifact.
•
Anthropology Museum of the People of New York Queens
In 1977 Margaret Mead and other anthropologists founded the Anthropology Museum
of the People of New York to promote cross-cultural understanding among the city's many
cultural groups.
•
Brooklyn Museum Brooklyn
Representing many of the world's great cultures, the collection of the Brooklyn
Museum of Art comprises one and a half million artworks. The magnificent six-story, 450,000square-foot Beaux-Arts building was designed in 1893 by the renowned firm of McKim, Mead
& White and was renovated and expanded in 2004.
•
Center for Art & Culture of Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn
Located in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the center offers classes
ranging from Brazilian martial arts to steel percussion and Afro-Caribbean dance and hosts a
year-round schedule of readings. The center also houses the Skylight Gallery, which was
designed by I.M. Pei and features exhibits of established and emerging artists of African
descent.
•
Doll and Toy Museum of New York City Brooklyn
The Doll and Toy Museum of New York City features exhibits on topics such as the
history of the teddy bear.
•
Ellis Island Immigration Museum Manhattan
Twelve million immigrants passed through the buildings of Ellis Island between the
years 1892 and 1954. Galleries filled with artifacts, historic photographs, posters & maps.
•
El Museo del Barrio Manhattan
Located at the north end of Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile, El Museo del Barrio is New
York City's only museum dedicated exclusively to Latin American and Latino art
•
Jewish Museum Manhattan
One of the largest museums of its kind in the world, The Jewish museum's collections
and exhibitions explore Jewish identity over 4,000 years. The permanent show, Culture and
Continuity: the Jewish Journey, showcases a significant portion of the museum's permanent
collection of 27,000 objects.
•
Lower East Side Tenement Museum Manhattan
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum promotes tolerance and historical perspective
on the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a
gateway to America. On guided tours, visitors explore restored apartments in 97 Orchard
Street, an 1863 tenement building, and learn about real families who once lived there.
•
Morgan Library & Museum Manhattan
The Morgan is not only a repository for some of the world's rarest books and
manuscripts—it's an important museum of art as well.
•
Metropolitan Museum of Art Manhattan
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was incorporated in 1870 and moved to its present
location in Central Park in 1880. It houses an encyclopedic collection of art objects from
virtually all periods and continents.
•
Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology Manhattan
The Fashion Institute of Technology is a trade school for those seeking careers in the
apparel industry. Its museum offers regular exhibits on all aspects of fashion and its satellite
industries—design, illustration, textile manufacture and photography among them.
•
National Jazz Museum in Harlem Manhattan
While the museum awaits its permanent home, it maintains a Visitors Center, open
Monday through Friday, that holds books, CDs and DVDs for the public's perusal. There is
also a photo exhibition in this space that holds many events, such as free jazz education courses.
•
National Museum of the American Indian—Smithsonian Institution Manhattan
The museum has one of the world's finest and most comprehensive assemblages of
Indian artifacts, spanning 10,000 years of Native American heritage.
•
Queens County Farm Museum Queens
Amid the houses and apartment buildings of Floral Park, Queens, sits the Queens
County Farm Museum, a 17th-century farm with ducks, geese, sheep and apple and pear
orchards. This 47-acre spread has been the site of continuous farming for over 200 years and is
now is also a museum chronicling the agricultural history of New York City
•
Staten Island Museum
The museum’s holdings are organized into three main collections: Natural Sciences,
Fine Art and History Archives & Library. The natural science collections encompass over
500,000 botanical, biological, anthropological and mineral specimens including bird nests and
eggs, mounted animals, fossils, shells, and a significant collection of insects, including
important type of specimens.
•
The New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex and Store Manhattan
The gallery annex is just off the Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal in the
Shuttle Passage, next to the Station Master's office.
•
Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace Manhattan
The home in which Theodore Roosevelt lived until he was 14 has been reconstructed
with 1865 period rooms and galleries. The museum contains the largest display anywhere of
memorabilia related to this man, including artifacts from his youth, his days as a rancher and
explorer and his presidency.
•
Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum Brooklyn
This wood-shingled Dutch Colonial farmhouse, built about 1652, is probably the oldest
home in New York City. It stands on land that is believed to have been purchased in 1636 from
the Canarsie Indians by Van Twiller, the first director general of New Netherland. With Dutch
ceramic tiles and a period garden, visitors can enter into the household of the Dutch settlers in
the New World.
•
Waterfront Museum Brooklyn
The Waterfront Museum seeks to promote awareness of the New York waterfront
through exhibitions, historic preservation projects and education and family programming.
Summer Math Assignment- Due on September 9
Give the following problems your best effort. Be sure to show all of your work or explain your
reasoning with complete sentences. If you get stuck, try to describe in a question what it is you
do not understand.
1. Imagine the temperature outside is -5 degrees Fahrenheit (brrrr!). Imagine it then deceases
by 8 degrees. What is the new temperature?
2. You and a friend decide to split a pizza. You eat one fourth of the pizza and your friend one
third.
a. Who ate more of the pizza? Explain your answer.
b. What fraction of the pizza remains? Show your work carefully and explain what each
step means.
3. Imagine you had a job this summer that paid you $8 per hour, and that you had fifty dollars
before the summer started.
a. How much money would you have in total if you worked 10 hours (and didn’t spend any
of the money)? How do you know?
b. Write an equation that describes how much money you would have in total, y, for any
number of hours that you work, x. Test your equation for some different x values to
show that it works.
NOTE: A resource we’ll be making extensive use of this year is Khan Academy. If you have
access to an internet-ready computer, you should check it out (khanacademy.org). Click
SEARCH KHAN ACADEMY in the bottom left corner. Check out the videos and exercises
under these searches: Adding and Subtracting Negative Numbers (for #1), Adding and
Subtracting Fractions with Unlike Denominators (for #2). Explore the website in addition to
these videos and exercises.
KENKEN!
KenKen is a number puzzle that requires logical reasoning. The objective, like Sudoku, is to fill in each square
grid so that each number (depending on the size of the square grid) appears exactly once in each column and
each row. In addition, the numbers have to be arranged so that within each bold “cage” the numbers satisfy the
given condition. For example, in Puzzle 1 below, the cage with “4 x” written in the corner of it means that you
must use three numbers between 1 and 3 (since it is a 3 by 3 puzzle) so that the numbers multiply to make 4.
(So there should be a 2, 1, 2, starting in the top left and going to the bottom right of that cage.) Can you take it
from there?
PUZZLE 1
PUZZLE 2
NOTE: Since the puzzles below are on 4 by 4 grids, you now must use the numbers 1 through
4 in each row and column. Good luck!
PUZZLE 3
PUZZLE 4
NOTE: A great way to keep your math skills sharp over the summer is to play games like
KenKen everyday. Check out the website kenken.com and see what level puzzle you can master.