This is Jennie Elena Cook-Kollars. Jennie is her mom's mom's name. Elena is suggestive of several folks: her great-grandma Lena, family friend Helen, almost-cousin Eleanor, and a teenager in the Berkshires.
She likes paint, glue, tape, glitter, and so forth and makes some project every couple of days. Her first household chore was to put out the placemats on the dinner table.
Jennie has moved on from Doyon elementary school through the Ipswich Middle School to the Ipswich High School. Both the high school and the middle school occupied a freshly constructed school building just a few years ago. The remarkable layout of the new school has occasioned a lot of comment from surrounding towns. The new institution promises to be a real boon to Ipswich.
Many years ago Jennie's combined first and second grade class did their own web project and Jennie had her own page. She was active in a gymnastics program outside of school for many years. When she was quite a bit younger she participated in a monthly playgroup with several others about the same age.
Her current interests include making music with both the viola and the oboe, kayaking (for help see Essex River Basin Adventures or New England Small Craft), theater lighting, and mathematics. With the viola she's part of a string quartet Little Women of girls all about her age, and with the oboe she participates in band (including playing at home football games for a perfect losing season, which she didn't especially enjoy). She has a couple kayaks which can be carried on the roof of the car for outings either with a friend or with her Mom. She was one of the prime members on the Math League team fielded by the Ipswich Middle School. She attended a JHU/CTY course on Cryptography for three weeks in summer 2002 and a course on Mathematical Reasoning in summer 2003. Her younger brother joins her in many activities.
Here's the web page Jennie drew many years ago. And here's Jennie's current website.
She picked up the art of reading young, without any encouragement beyond Sesame street and a couple beginner books. In kindergarten she was so good at it she could read a whole page of material written for kids a couple years older before she got tired. A few years ago I gave her a copy of "The Once And Future King," then belatedly realized some of the content might not have been age appropriate. Now she's read tens of times more fantasy/science fiction books than I've even heard of. Her checkout lists from the library make mine look puny. Her reading skills are scary to me.
When she was in the oldest grade at her primary school, as a "responsible oldster" she was in and out of the classroom quite a bit. It's weird to me to see how grown up she is, because I remember clearly when she learned to walk and it doesn't seem all that long ago.
At school she's learning the viola and participates in all the stringed instrument activities. She's proud of how many different songs she can play. She figured out on her own how to tune the instrument before they covered that in school. Over the years she's gotten more serious about the viola. It probably helps that the string teacher is the mother of one of her good friends. Now she plays in chamber music groups and the Northshore Youth Symphony Orchestra. She's also recently started to play the oboe as well as the viola, the idea being she can play in the orchestra with one instrument and in the band with the other instrument at the same time.
She's part of the Kollars family.
Here's another picture.
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Location: N42 40.86' W070 50.35'
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