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Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 3, No. 31 - August 5, 2021
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................7
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Food.......................................5
Hawthorne............................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals............................. 4,6,7
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Mostly
Sunny
73˚/62˚
Saturday
Partly
Cloudy
72˚/61˚
Sunday
Partly
Cloudy
70˚/61˚
Lawndale Tribune
AND lAwNDAle News
Hawthorne Press Tribune
Featuring the Weekly Newspapers of Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lawndale
Firefighters Ride from L.A. to
N.Y. to Honor 9/11 Victims
Firefighters from all over California (including LACoFD), Colorado, and Washington kicked-off their cross-country, 3,200-mile bike ride from the Santa Monica Pier to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11
and pay tribute to the first responders, including 343 firefighters, who passed away on that day. Cyclists will also remember 400+ members of the FDNY and NYPD who have lost their lives from post-9/11
illnesses. The Fire Velo riders will arrive in New York on September 9 at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Photo by Edith Lai, courtesy LACoFD.
Kimberly Bredberg Explores Alternative
Learning Methods for South Bay Students
By Kiersten Vannest
The public school system in El Segundo
is notoriously renowned. El Segundo high
school ranked in the top 5% of high schools
in California for math proficiency and reading
proficiency, and the graduation rate is top tier.
But what if the traditional method of learning
doesn’t work for your child? Standardized
teaching methods have worked for decades,
but what happens to the children who don’t
work well under these methods? This is a
question Kimberley Bredberg set out to explore
for her own child in the form of a new
K-12 micro-school called Waterhouse Guild.
A mother of four children, Bredberg’s
present journey began with her oldest
daughter in the first grade. “My daughter
was a super curious and precocious firstgrader,”
says Bredberg. Her daughter was in
a classroom of only eight students at a school
Bredberg worked at in San Luis Obispo.
Having a heavily pencil-and-paper policy at
home, straying away from electronics, her
daughter was already very versed and excited
about reading and writing. The problem, she
explains, was that her teacher would not let
her read above the first-grade level.
“That made me so sad, because at the
time she was reading at a high level, chapter
books, and she would sit on the swing with a
book in one hand and a slice of watermelon
in the other,” she says. So, in the transition
to second grade, she pulled her daughter
out of her school and decided to experiment
with homeschooling.
Her methods appealed to many parents
going through similar struggles with their
children. So about twenty years ago, she
began developing Waterhouse Guild, a microschool
program with roots in homeschooling
based here in El Segundo. The idea was to
individualize education while still requiring
rigorous academics, all based around the
humanities.
Though all academic fields are studied in
the program, Bredberg specifically wanted
to focus on reading, writing, and critical
thinking. Along with her other business, a
publishing company, Bredberg and her team
developed their own language arts curriculum.
Class periods are in longer blocks to
encourage focus and allow subjects to be fully
explored. Teachers are experts in their field,
be it chemistry or art, or music. “I think one
of the sad things happening in our culture
is that we seem to think that children have
short attention spans when they really don’t.
I sometimes feel like two hours for science
isn’t enough,” Bredberg laments, explaining
her choice to go with longer learning periods.
Of Bredberg’s multiple degrees, she has
a particular love of science, in which she
obtained a degree. Because of her experience
in the field, she sought to find a way
working world, she says, science isn’t segmented
and separate like it was in school. So
to her, it’s important to teach children from
a young age the way they’ll be interacting
with subjects outside of school.
Parent Josette Murphy describes her child’s
experience with math at Waterhouse Guild.
Having gone to public school for a few
years, her daughter was doing relatively okay
in math but struggled to switch over to the
Waterhouse method. Her teachers immediately
saw the holes that needed to be repaired in
her understanding of mathematics and asked
that she stay an hour extra a week to work
one on one with them. After going back and
getting a firm understanding of past ideas
and how they correlate with current lessons,
her daughter felt comfortable moving on to
the next level. This kind of individualized
help to ensure a complete understanding
before leveling up came from Bredberg’s
own experience in math.
Despite having a background in science,
Bredberg describes math as her “arch-enemy”
all the way up into high school. In the traditional
system, students are required to finish
each math level, but this doesn’t always give
them a firm grasp of all the concepts. Bredberg
to make science more integrated and taught
with context so that each subject wouldn’t be
taught in a vacuum with no relation to other
courses or real-world application. She uses
the human body as an example, explaining
that it isn’t only related to biology but also
to chemistry, physics, and electricity. When
a child comes out of school and into the See Kimberly Bredberg, page 4
finally went to a teacher and just started
crying because she couldn’t understand what
she was missing. This teacher sat down with
her and figured out where the holes were,
and worked with her until she could not
only finish but understand the work required
to pass her current course. This experience