Here is some helpful advice from our boarding life staff and boarding students on how to deal with homesickness while attending boarding school.

Friendships grow strong among students who attend boarding school.

It’s important that students learn how to deal with homesickness at boarding school. There can be many reasons as to why students feel bouts of homesickness while attending boarding school. Although homesickness doesn’t happen to every single boarding student, most boarding students report being homesick at least once during the school year. Though they have learned to cope with this feeling via different means, a strong school staff that keeps them focused, activities that keep them active and busy, and friends they can count on are all key factors to overcoming homesickness at boarding school.

Boarding school staff is well trained to handle homesick students. They attend nationally recognized conferences throughout the year by The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) and Small Boarding School Association (SBSA) to name a couple.

Boarding School Staff Advice on How to Deal with Homesickness

Prepare for It – You will likely feel homesick at some point, but the most important thing is how you deal with this emotion. Prepare yourself mentally when you leave home that the first week is going to be very new and perhaps overwhelming, but like everything you adapt. You find friends. You find your place and get comfortable. So our biggest advice is don’t give up, but to remain strong, positive, and open-minded.

Keep in Touch – We encourage our students to keep the lines of communication open with family and friends. Now you can even Facetime or Skype with them!

Be Active and Involved – We also recommend that students need to be active in the school community. It helps everyone have sense of purpose and meaning. We recommend that all students be as involved in athletics and extracurricular activities as possible – without compromising their academic performance.

Talk with Us – We are here for you and we want to help – any time of the day. If you don’t tell us your sad, lonely or homesick how will we ever know?! We can help you find ways to get more involved, build more friendships, and will mentor you at our best with any thing you may need help with.

Boarding Student Advice on How to Deal with Homesickness

Students who have felt homesick while at boarding school, shared their advice with us.

Speak Up – Boarding students said that whenever you feel homesick to talk it out and seek help. Holding it in will just make it worse. They agree that it’s always helpful to seek company of a good friend, go for a walk, or catch up with schoolwork.

Go to the Faculty and Staff – Our boarding students also said that having “nice and understanding staff” always helps them stay focused and positive throughout the academic year. Our faculty and staff go above and beyond to make sure our students are comfortable and enjoying their Farragut experience. They also plan trips to theme parks, the movies and mall, group dinners, camping excursions, community service events and more.

Be Involved – Feeling lonely still? Find more hobbies. At Admiral Farragut Academy we almost have a club or organization for almost anything you can imagine from robotics to scuba to knitting!

Make it Home - Every boarding student should display personal photos of family and friends just as you would at home. Decorating your room makes it feel like “yours” and every student grows to love their room and their roommates. Don’t be discouraged when you first arrive to a bare room – trust us, within a week it will be looking more like home!

Comfort Food – Ok, Ok. So you miss “home-cooked” meals? Well at Admiral Farragut Academy we have family-style dinners to make up for it. Most of our food is made from scratch (even our salad dressing!) and we have waffle makers during breakfast and sandwich panini makers during lunch. It’s just like a bigger version of your kitchen at home.

Music - Listen to your favorite music. Music can change the whole vibe of your day so make sure it’s upbeat and positive!

Appreciate Your Surroundings – The one thing our boarders all agree about is that homesickness can be relieved by enjoying the sunny outdoors, and at our beautiful, tropical, waterfront campus that’s easy to do. Many boarding students have shared with us that just looking out the window view from their dorm room at the school’s waterfront calms them down and helps them realize the many opportunities they have because they’re attending boarding school.

We hope the next time you’re looking for how to deal with homesickness while at boarding school you’ll look around you and realize that everyone is cheering for you and that you are a crucial part of the school!

Learn why teaching in the 21st century classroom is a good thing!

Why does teaching in the 21st century classroom still feel like a new concept? Even though I’ve already been doing it for 12 years, 3 months, 25 days, and 8  hours!

I recently attended the FCIS Spring Symposium on Technology. The keynote speaker was a man by the name of Felix Jacomino. He was a phenomenal presenter. I was moved so much that on the way home from the symposium, when I was talking with my mom, I told her all about the “Flipped Classroom.” She had no idea what it meant, so I told her. I told her that it meant you did your teaching as homework and then when the students came to class, you let them lead the class with questions about what you covered the night before in your podcast.

What a crazy way to think, huh? But, it’s not. Students today are thinking and absorbing so much information that you must move with the times. Don’t change completely who you are, but adapt to their needs. Teaching is all about them/for them, right? So, why are so many of us still teaching the same way we were taught 20 years ago? It’s hard to process but it is a must. What do you bring to the table that a computer does not? A lot, right?

Here are some resources to help you teach in the 21st century:

• Bloom’s Taxonomy for Ipads
• Felix Jacomino
• Wordle
• SSEDS (Symbaloo Gallery)
• Buck Institute for Education (PBL)
• Wolfram Alpha (computational knowledge engine)
• www.scoop.it
• Tony Vincent (Learning in Hand)
• Haiku Learning
• Padlet
• Edmodo

Flippin’ Out! (Resources for Flipping Your Classroom)
By flipping your classroom, you can spend class time with inquiry based learning!

Podcasts for SMARTBoard

• QuickTime Capture
• Vimeo
• Youtube.com

Podcasts for IPad

• Notability
• Show Me

Blog post written by Sandra Miller, Middle School Drama and English Teacher at Admiral Farragut Academy. Admiral Farragut Academy is a private boarding and day school in St. Petersburg, Florida.

There are many benefits of attending boarding school in Florida. The four main benefits are: weather, location, unique opportunities, and affordability.

Weather

Students paddleboard at a local nature preserve… in November!

With an average of 361 days of sunshine and temperatures in the mid 70′s year round, boarding students love the beautiful weather that St. Petersburg, Florida offers. This tropical weather gives students the opportunity to enjoy the outdoors every day! They have sports practice outside, eat lunch at picnic tables overlooking the bay next to the school, and in-between classes are always found gathered under shady trees discussing their last class or who’s taking who to prom. At a shady park-like campus students can soak up some of the beneficial nutrients of Vitamin D that many people crave during winters up north.

Location

Location can make a big difference when your child is away at a boarding school and you may only see them during Thanksgiving, or sometimes, just Christmas break. A location like St. Petersburg, Florida is very convenient because many families already choose Florida for vacation or for the location of their second home. This means you can plan family vacations to Florida where your child at boarding school already lives. Nearby airport locations are another factor when it comes to choosing a boarding school because that means your child can easily travel to and from home. It’s even better if it’s an international airport like St. Petersburg’s Tampa International Airport, which has flights going to almost every major city in the United States and easy connections when flying out of the country. During a student’s senior year, it’s more convenient when students plan college visits and travel alone if an airport is nearby.

Unique Opportunities

You will find Admiral Farragut Academy’s day and boarding students across the street at the waterfront after school for sailing, fishing, kayaking, cast netting, seine netting, and more.

You will find that our boarding school in Florida offers an enormous amount of hands-on and out-of-the-classroom experiences throughout the entire school year! You will find our day and boarding students across the street at the waterfront for after school sailing, fishing, kayaking, cast netting, seine netting, and more. Attending a boarding school in Florida also gives students the unique opportunity to be involved in courses like aviation, scuba and advanced marine biology where crystal clear skies and warm waters matter. Florida is known for its crystal clear springs, national and state parks, off-shore fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, and more.

Affordability

Boarding schools in the South are more affordable in nature compared to schools you may find in the Northeast. Without putting quality of education at risk, southern boarding schools can grant you a high level of education at a reasonable tuition. Boarding school at Admiral Farragut Academy costs $32,000-$42,000 depending upon if the student is international and how many days they will be boarding, either 5 or 7. Boarding schools in the northeast start as high as $49,000 a year.

Most Importantly

It’s most important that you find a school that fits your child. Learn more about unique opportunities, lifelong mentors and friendships, academic excellence, leadership qualities and more that students learn at our private boarding and day school located in St. Petersburg, Florida. Discover Farragut.

Presently, there is a movement to incorporate more art thought “creativity and innovation” into the STEM curriculum. The acronym for this infusion of the “Arts” into the curriculum is STEAM.

Not only are the visual arts a component of this shift, but also classes such as drama, film and animation, music, and photography.

Written By: Robert Gibbons, Curriculum Director at Admiral Farragut Academy

One could argue that there has always been the creative side to design and creation in the STEM curriculum. I can remember back to my high school days when I took a drafting and design class. Bringing a concept I had in my mind to life on paper was the challenge of this course. In fact, I grew up in a General Motors town in Indiana in the 60’s and one of my most memorable experiences was participating in a competition to design futuristic cars.

Emphasizing creativity and ingenuity into the core of STEM reinforces the concept that all learning is interrelated. The 21st century skills of communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking are not exclusive to one discipline but are essential for our students to be able to solve problems and to be successful in any profession. Students today will need to compete in an ever-increasing global workforce. There are many ways we infuse the arts into our curriculum, for example projects include; the design and building of a robot, volcano eruption model, creating a Viking shield, and model airplanes. It is importnat o strengthen the curriculum in all STEM subjects and to lead the way in the STEM + Arts = STEAM area. To find out more about this initiative visit www.stemtosteam.org.

Below are examples of the creative, hands-on, project-based learning that is being integrated throughout the curriculum at Admiral Farragut Academy.

Elementary School STEAM Examples

Students designed their own eruptive volcano, representation of the solar system, and created a model membrane using   household materials like tin foil.

Elementary Volcano 

Middle School STEAM Examples

Students created a Flashy Fish for a marine science class contest, designed, built and tested a bridge for a project in their STEM class, and teamed up to construct an underwater ROV that they tested in the pool. In addition, the middle school used the 3D Autodesk software to design their own Viking shield for a unit they were studying in geography class.

PLTW in middle school

High School STEAM Examples

Our Aviation program uses a variety of projects including building and personalizing model airplanes. The Robotics Club has used the free 3D Sketch Up program to design several projects over the last three years. Projects the members have worked on include a model of the Huntley Field House’s obstacle course and a remodeled version of the Russell Building. Club members are currently redesigning the library area. In addition, the Robotics Club designed its own robot to the objectives of the First Tech Challenge. Students in the Project Lead The Way classes are constantly creating and designing projects using the 3D software. Working together to design a functional project and solve problems is the cornerstone to this kind of project-based learning.

Model Airplanes

When looking for a boarding school the top 10 things to look for is the location, school size, academics, Faculty and Staff, Dorms and Campus Facilities, Weekend Activities, whether it’s Religious/ Military/ Single Sex/ Coed, the Athletic Program, College Placement, and if the Tuition is affordable.

Written by the Admissions Director at Admiral Farragut Academy in St. Petersburg, Florida

Location

Decide what type of weather you would like to live in. Do you prefer the warm tropical weather like Admiral Farragut Academy or do you want to experience the four seasons like our old location in Pine Beach, New Jersey? Do you want to attend a school near a large city or be tucked away in the country? Weather can affect your mood and it is very important to take this into consideration. Consider where you live now and what kind of climate you are considering. Visit several schools so that you can compare and get a better idea of what will make you happy. Most boarding schools have larger campuses than normal. Research the surrounding towns and cities to find out about more about the atmosphere of where you will be living.

School Size

Consider the size of the boarding school. Do you want to attend a small school where you will know everyone’s name or a large school? Think about what type of students attend this boarding school. Is this school primarily a boarding school or are there day students too? Having a day student component allows boarding students to go home on the weekends with local families.  Most schools have a percentage of international students. Ask about what countries and states are represented. Ask to visit for a day so that you can meet the students and see if it feels like home.

Academics

All boarding schools offer an excellent college preparatory education. Look for schools that offer the area of study that you are interested in. If you know that you want to study something specific, find the school that offers the classes you want. Maybe you want to be an engineer, find out what kind of science and math classes are offered and if they have a robotics club. Find out if tutorials are offered before and after school and ask about evening study hall. Boarding schools offer small classes and teach life skills. Visit websites to learn more about the benefits of boarding versus day schools.

Faculty and Staff

Boarding schools are your home away from home. You want to know who you will be spending your days with and make sure you are comfortable. Find out how many faculty members live on campus and who they are. Ask if you will have an adviser or mentor to help you when you are feeling homesick. Connect with current students online to ask questions about the atmosphere of the school and the faculty and staff.

Dorm & Campus Facilities

Take a look at the campus and find out what type of dormitory the school has. What do the dorm rooms look like? Are there bathrooms in each room or do you walk down the hall to use a community bathroom? How many students are in each room? Ask about how the school places roommates and what to expect. Does the campus have wifi? Will you have access to a gym on the weekends? Do students like the food in the dining hall? How far do you walk to get to class? Ask about the security on campus and the guidelines for leaving campus. Remember that this will be your home away from home and you want to enjoy your experience.

Weekend Activities

What do you want to do on your weekends?  Do you want to be visiting major cities on the weekends or staying on campus and playing a game of basketball in the gym? Find out what most students do on the weekends. Weekends give you a lot of free time and this is when you can feel homesick or bored. It is important to find a school that will fill your time with options. Take a look at the location to see what options will be available. If a school is located near the beaches or amusement parks you know that you will have access to those types of activities on the weekends. Find out if there is a calendar online with a schedule of boarding events and activities.

Religious/ Military/ Single Sex/ Coed

Do you want a school with structure and discipline? Do you think you need a single sex school to stay focused? Ask yourself if you want to attend a traditional boarding school or do you want to explore the other types out there. Every school is unique and has its own environment. You want to find the school where you feel most comfortable. Schools have different teaching styles and values. Do you want to wear a uniform or have the freedom to wear what you want. There are so many types of boarding schools, find the one that best fits your personality.

Athletics

Find out what activities and sports are offered. Boarding schools can offer different sports and activities based on their location. Some schools are located on the water and can offer sailing others are in the mountains and offer skiing.  Most boarding schools will encourage you to participate in sports because it is important to keep a balanced lifestyle. Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? Ask about the number of state champions and how competitive the school is amongst their competitors.

College Placement

Most boarding schools are college preparatory and they will mentor each student to find the right university. The College Placement Director is the person who will meet with the students as young as 9th grade and keep them on the right track all the way to graduation. Ask the school to provide a list of their college placement and compare it to your goals. Take a look at the AP classes or dual enrollment classes offered.

Tuition

Make a budget and then investigate to see which schools would be options for you. Always ask about financial aid and other scholarships. Factor in the expenses of flights, books, spending money and ask about extra fees. Most boarding schools are non-profit organizations and they are tuition driven. Schools with large endowments usually have the flexibility to offer more financial aid.

Having a strong sense of community helps children learn how to cope with stress and become better persons.

What is the best choice when considering a Religious Vs. Non-religious education in private schools? There are certain parameters parents should considered when choosing between a religious or non-religious school. The values your children grow up on will be the values that shape their adulthood. Does the school you decide to enroll them have to be religious to be good? When it comes to education in private schools, there are usually two main streams to the religious approach.

Call it religious education

Most religious schools get students enrolled based on their parents’ religion. Children will not necessarily follow the same religious path of their parents, however many parents choose this for their children because they want to build a strong moral background.

Some things you should have in mind include: Is the curriculum rigid? Does it inspire learning? Is it designed in a way in which independent learning is encouraged?

It’s important to understand that because religious schools are based out of certain guidelines set by the religion, they are allowed to select their staff – both teaching and non-teaching – on grounds of their religion. This could potentially hurt the school’s performance. A great instructor could be left out for not sharing the same religious views.

 A glance at non-religious education

Some of the things to have in mind when considering a non-religious school: Make sure the school offers an environment that fosters a  sense of community. Research has shown that supportive communities – whether religious or non-religious – help children generate ways to cope with stress and become better individuals.

Some schools do not tie a certain religion to their title, however the core values they abide by are pertinent to the development of  well-rounded children and future leaders.

If you decide to go the non-religious way, decide if the school has set values that will be needed for daily life. The core values that will be instilled in your children will transcend their time in school and will affect the lives they live in the future. The type of person they will become relies primarily on the mentors that shaped their path. Children learn best through observation, and having mentors that provide the correct behaviors give them a role model they will look up to and learn from.

Good luck in your search to find the “right” school for your child and your family!

In-house college fairs help seniors find different colleges.

Choosing a college is an important and sometimes difficult process! With so many options and so many factors to consider — like tuition costs, scholarships, program offerings and extracurricular activities — it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But, with a little time and patience, you can find the college that’s right for you. First, make a list of all of your prospective colleges and ask these 5 questions designed to help you narrow down your list to the one or few that will be the best fit for you.

1.       What major fields of study are offered?

Find out what fields of study are offered at your prospective colleges. This is very important. You’ll need to choose a school that offers the major you want to study, or at least a closely related major. If you’re unsure what you want to study, look for schools with a wide range of offerings that you are at least interested in pursuing.

2.       How much will it cost?

Calculate how much money it will cost to go to each prospective school. You’ll need to consider several factors such as the total amount for tuition, books, fees and living expenses minus the total of all scholarships, financial aid, college funds or other money that’s been allotted for your education. Knowing how much it will actually cost out-of-pocket to go to each school will help you in the decision-making process. Be sure to include all costs for each school so you can compare apples to apples.

3.       What “extras” are offered?

Explore the additional offerings of each prospective college. Things like intramural sports, cultural clubs and fitness facilities may help you choose between two schools in the end. See which school will best meet your personal interests and needs.

4.       How far is it from home?

Another factor to consider is being away from home. Would you like to live at home and commute to campus? Live on or off campus and visit home on the weekends? Maybe you’re okay coming home for just the holidays. Either way, the distance from home will determine how often you can go home and how much it will cost to travel back and forth.

5.       What additional opportunities are available?

Lastly, you should consider any additional opportunities for work, internships, outings or other experiences that you’re interested in. Whether the college offers such opportunities or you could seek them on your own, see what’s available in the vicinity of your prospective schools. This may help you make your final decision.

At Admiral Farragut Academy, our mission is to provide a college preparatory environment that fosters student success. We aim to help students achieve academic excellence, leadership skills and social development while preparing for the next phase in the journey — college. When the time comes for you to begin planning for this important next step, we hope you’ll find this guide helpful in navigating the many choices and decisions that must be made when choosing a college.