Author: Marisa Palmer

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

We had a leprechaun visit this week! He seemed to be after some gold coins that two heroes had left at the bottom of a leprechaun trap they built together in the makerspace. Unfortunately, the leprechaun was too sneaky, and got the gold coins but escaped the trap and left mayhem in his wake. Ask your hero(es) what they think happened!

Town Hall This Week

At Town Hall this week we had a request to incorporate reading aloud into D.E.A.R. (which is generally quiet independent reading time). We are going to experiment with this and add a D.E.A.R. block to the week during which heroes may read aloud to each other. Some are more excited about being read to, than reading aloud to a friend, so we will see how this plays out. It’s a great idea for building reading fluency (for the reader) and building language and vocabulary (for the listener).

Memoirs / Self-Portraits

The heroes have drafts of their various memoirs and we will work next week to revise and compile them into a short book! We also went through a critique process for self-portraits and finished those up this week.

Athletics

Our Guide has been leading a yoga unit over the past couple weeks and will continue until the end of the session next week. I included a photo or two of the heroes doing tree pose! They have been great sports about it and seem to enjoy yoga!

1000 Hour Outdoor Challenge

Last week, we introduced the 1000 Hour Outdoor Challenge! Heroes are tracking their hours outside each day, including outside time at home and on weekends. Once they reach 1000 hours as a group, they will be able to choose and plan an outdoor field trip on the bus line.

Business Fair

The children are all so excited for the Business Fair! This weekend heroes wrote their sales pitches and practiced them with friends, and in the mirror on their own. It has been so fun to watch them bring their businesses to life. We’ve also noticed their confidence growing as they have been able to take an idea, and create something tangible from it. Next, it is time to test it in the marketplace! There is no guarantee of success, and these heroes are courageous for putting themselves out there and risking failure. We celebrate that!

On Thursday, the children helped with Fair set-up which they enjoyed. They stuffed goodie bags for participants, placed them on tables along with table numbers, then did a walk-through of the space and determined what signage was needed for shoppers, and then created the signs. You will see them posted around tomorrow!

You probably already have, but don’t hesitate to continue to spread the word about the fair! We had 40 booth applicants and only 24 booths, which we were very happy about because there is clearly interest in participating in the event. Now we’ve been working hard to make sure we have shoppers via marketing partnerships with sponsors and judges, our own advertising on social media and event marketing, and a brief TV interview that’s going to air early Saturday AM. We are so pleased with the interest we’ve seen so far, and are cautiously optimistic that we will have good shopper turnout. We feel like we’ve done all we can do and now need to see who shows up.

Kudos to Ellie for really running the fair and pulling in sponsors and judges!!! She has been hard at work when she isn’t in the classroom.

Core Skills

Learners are beginning to embrace their badge plans and beginning to get in the routine of tracking their weekly S.M.A.R.T. goals and daily points earned. It’s all about practice and habit. It’s great to see them building these habits because it means they will have the tools they need to take responsibility over their own learning. After a while the Guides will turn more and more over to them without reminders. We also see them more easily dropping into “Flow” each day. There are still some days where there are struggles and challenges, but these are the positive trends we see!

Badge Ceremonies

This is something we will be rolling out next week and we think will generate excitement and motivation around working towards badges. So stay tuned!

Core Skills

This week we introduced a new points system for freedom levels. On the one hand, the new system (which is in-line with Acton Austin) makes it harder to earn points (i.e. they get fewer points than they did before for the same amount of work), but they have more opportunities to earn points (e.g. reading, participating in Socratic discussions, etc). For the next two weeks, learners will operate at the Freedom Level they were at at the end of last session, while earning their freedom level for the last week of this session. We are interested to see how this goes at the end of next week when they realize they may need to step up their game to get back to “Soaring.” At the same time, there are some elements of “Nesting” that may be helpful to their learning, like having a set core skills schedule. 

We’ve also linked responsibilities to the freedom levels system. In addition to earning points through focused work, heroes need to engage in setting and tracking personal goals and participate in Quests to earn higher freedom levels.

The biggest challenge has been to guiding some of heroes to report their points with precision. Funny how 40 rounds up to 100 🙂 Eventually we will delegate auditing to the heroes and their running partner, but for now the Guides are auditing points.

Quest: E-Ship

The heroes made progress on their business fair signs this week. It sounds like everyone is working on their prototypes (and inventory) at home which works for us! We had some excitement this week with a paint (teal spray primer, no less) incident in the kitchen. Mr. Brandon amazingly was able to clean it all up!

This coming heroes will work on sales pitches so that they are prepared to interact with customers and talk about the benefits and features of their products! On Friday, they will have time to begin setting up their booths, so if you’d like to send booth decor that day, we welcome it. We won’t have time to “manufacture” inventory at school, so we’ve talked with heroes about budgeting time at home to get this done.

In addition to working on booth signs, this week we explored substitutes and competition. We played an online game called “Coffee Shop” which helped our heroes learn about and reflect on value offered to customers relative to the price we are able to charge for our product.

Writers’ Workshop

Heroes continued to explore memoirs. They each wrote about “a time that nothing happened” and “a time I ate something weird.” The most challenging part of the memoirs genre seems to be figuring out what to write in response to the prompts. They are improving at this though, which is great to see!

A couple of our older heroes started working on their typing skills this week during core skills using a free program called Typing Club. They write their first draft by hand, but then revise using their Chromebook, do they develop both handwriting and typing skills.

Art

As part of our Memoirs exploration, we worked on self-portraits during art! We will go through the critique process and continue to work on these next week. The heroes seemed to have a lot of fun with these, painting themselves as a band of ninjas! Before embarking on our self-portraits we looked at examples from famous artists and saw that there are all kinds of ways, besides realism, to approach art, and self portraits, in particular.

Civilization

We moved from Ancient Egypt to Sumer (Mesopotamia) and Israel (Canaan). We learned about King Sargon, the first Military Dictator of the ancient world. We also read Yertle the Turtle, and discussed our over-arching question for the year: does power corrupt? Heroes believe it does! We touched on some of the major differences between a dictatorship vs. a democracy and two major things that came up were free speech and voting.

We then read stories of Israel and engaged in our civilizations challenge, which was to put modern-day borders on a map of Egypt and Mesopotamia. This was quite challenging even with the help of our globes!

Personal Goals

Ask your child what their personal goal is! On Friday, each hero set a personal goal for themselves based on the Full Circle 360 Feedback they received from last week. This is very brave! They will also be tracking their progress towards their goal until the end of this session. Goals included using kind words, speaking up in discussions, and participating more in activities to support the group.

1000 Hours Outdoors Challenge

This week we launched the 1000 Hours Outdoors Challenge. With the cold weather, the children were opting to stay inside instead of going through the process and getting boots and gear on to enjoy the fresh air. If the heroes can achieve 1000 hours outdoors by the end of the school year in mid-July, they will earn a field trip on the bus line that they plan and design. They track their hours on a large posterboard in the hall. Already they are embracing the challenge and opting for lunches outdoors in addition to regular outdoor play time!

Studio Maintenance

What we are noticing is that there is a lot of dilly-dallying and playing during studio maintenance time by some heroes. It affects other heroes because they have to pick up the slack. And it prevents the group from ending the day on time. Acton offers freedom to children, but with this freedom comes responsibility, like caring for our space (we’ve talked about how a tidy space helps us be more productive and prevents mice and bugs!). 

We are noticing some of the affected heroes leaning into their friends to do the work, which is very helpful and good leadership!

At the same time, the Guides are going to launch a revised studio maintenance system on Monday with job checklists for each area, and an assigned peer to check their work. We are also launching “Mystery Friday Reward.” Those who complete studio maintenance every day, on-time, will get to be a part of the Mystery Friday Reward on Friday afternoons (stuff like game time, extra free time, a short movie, special project etc). We will see how it goes! A Guide’s role is one of game-maker so we are always looking for ways to gamify activities – attaching rewards, systems, consequences – so that over time we can delegate more and more responsibility to the heroes.

As usual, this week was a lot of fun!

E-Ship Quest:

The heroes are displaying a lot of enthusiasm for their businesses! Next week, please bring prototype materials, product packaging materials and/or booth decor materials. On Monday, they will have the opportunity to either work on their prototypes, packaging or booth decor and signage (the booth is an 8′ table). They will continue to work on these on and off up until the business fair on March 18th, so they don’t need to bring everything at once. We will spend 2 – 3 hours this week working on those elements.

Note: when your children applied to the business fair, they made the following promise:“I promise that the work on my business was done by me, that I earned our entry fee and that I will repay any loans required to launch my business, such as materials and marketing/signage expense.”

This week heroes explored unit economics by role-playing in a game called “Sally the Seller.” It was through our exploration of unit economics that one team of heroes decided to pivot their business and focus on a different product. Good learning! We also explored the costs and benefits of hiring employees by playing a simulation game called RoboRush. Finally, on Friday, heroes made watermelon popsicles using two manufacturing processes: artisan-making and assembly line. They measured the results. Ask your learner(s) what they discovered about quality control and how they enjoyed their watermelon popsicles!

Organizational Jeopardy / Core Skills

The Guide created a fun jeopardy game to help the heroes diagnose for themselves where they need improved organizational systems. They now have a binder for each core skill: reading, math, writing and spelling & grammar. They also have a badge plan binder where they can track their S.M.A.R.T. goals and progress on their badge plan. They are still figuring out the badge plans and figuring out the answer to the questions: “why does this matter?” We will be reaching out to schedule Journey Meetings with parents and learners prior to Spring Break, and we will also be brainstorming badge rewards / celebrations with the heroes to create a system of extrinsic motivation.

Civilization

We wrapped up our exploration of Ancient Egypt this week. We had a lot of fun learning about mummies, pyramids and early writing forms across a number of civilizations (Sumerians, Mesopotamians and Egyptians). Art this week was dedicated to making modern-day papyrus and decorating the papyrus with hieroglyphics. They also each received a real papyrus bookmark that they can use for D.E.A.R. (drop everything and read).

Writers’ Workshop

The childrens are exploring memoirs and one of the biggest challenges has been dealing with writers’ block. We’ve discussed strategies for overcoming writers’ block such as brainstorming our ideas in advance, and letting go of perfectionism when writing since we can always revise later. This seems to have helped because two of our older learners are choosing to use part of their core skills time to journal and write stories. Ask your child about their writing process!

Montessori Elements

Some of you may know that our Guide is completing her Montessori certification and we are investing in Montessori materials for the Spark studio. This week, Ellie introduced the Montessori letters to our younger learners and they REALLY enjoyed it. It’s made the writers’ workshops more accessible to them. After building a sentence on the writing mat, they translate it into their journal or onto their laptop. It provides a writing model once they have built the sentence. And provides a hands-on alternative to Chromebooks.

We are developing a Montessori area in the Discovery Studio so children can explore math and writing this way.

Personal Growth

Lots of growth happening! At Town Hall this Friday, we discussed why studio maintenance is important, how we should assign jobs, and what we should do when a friend isn’t helping with studio maintenance. There was a discussion of consequences, and should there be a “punishment” for not contributing? What if a person knows ahead of time what the consequences will be? Then isn’t it their choice? We settled on tying contribution to studio maintenance to our Friday Mystery Reward activity. If a hero isn’t contributing to studio maintenance daily, then they will not participate in the Friday Mystery Reward activity. The Guides are betting studio maintenance participation will increase dramatically.

The heroes also conducted 360 reviews – we call this “full circle feedback.” This is something we will do at least once a session. This session we will do it twice and then at the end of every session going forward. Heroes and Guides gave and received feedback (two stars and a wish) to each other. Some feedback was surprising! Like when we think we are being funny, but it might actually be hurtful to a friend. Or how our refusal to participate in an activity negatively affects other heroes’ ability to learn and have fun. Or how we wish a hero would talk more in discussions because they have great things to say and we want to hear! Or how we admire others’ persistence and can-do attitude.

Next week they will each set one personal growth goal to work on until the end of this session.

Despite the snow days, this was a productive week!

E-Ship Quest

We launched the session’s “E-Ship” quest. E-ship is short for entrepreneurship. And heroes are sailing from Motivation Island to Market Island to Identity Island this week. Next week: Unit Economics and Hiring Island……

You may notice your child(ren) coming home with handouts or activities from our E-Ship quest. Depending on your child’s business idea, preparing for the business fair may require your support in the form of funding, and help purchasing supplies and materials for their product and booth.

This week, they worked on:

Motivation Island – exploring their passions and interests and what calls to them as a business idea, relative to what skills they have to employ to make that business a reality. We call this “context.” Is this the right time and am I the right person?

On Thursday, they submitted their business idea and officially applied for the business fair via the business fair website. The business fair is on Saturday, March 18, from 9am – 12pm and will serve as this session’s exhibition.

The business fair is full by the way! We have 24 entrepreneurs and entrepreneur teams from the community signed up to sell. Please spread the word to friends and family so that children have buyers! We are also advertising on Facebook, have brought in sponsors, posted fliers around town and are spreading the word to community groups. We appreciate your help!

Market Island – one step in the business-building process is market research. On Thursday, Heroes created a survey to gather information about who their target customers are. They may need your help in distributing this survey to friends and family either via email or hard copy.

Identity Island – On Friday, we began exploring behavioral economics and tied that to branding and identity. Heroes worked on designing a logo, slogan and “booth” design. The booths consist of an 8’ long table in Fellowship Hall.

Core Skills

On Friday, during morning launch, we explored “Flow.” We discussed what it is, when we’ve experienced it and strategies for getting into it, like being in our challenge zone and blocking out distractions. They were surprised to learn that a person can be “in the zone” for as long as two hours! Hmmm…..just about the same amount of time we have for core skills!

The heroes decided to implement the strategy of working in different spaces in the studio in order to block out distractions. We also talked about what apps keep them in their challenge zone and the Guides did one-on-one check-ins to help them navigate the apps and help them get to their challenge zones within them.

What a game changer in terms of concentration and focus yesterday during core skills. They are also experimenting with taking timed movement breaks or snack breaks and then getting back into flow immediately after. That’s something we will continue to explore! 

Writer’s Workshop

This session the heroes are writing memoirs. With the snow days and time pressure to get businesses going, we launched Memoirs on Tuesday and will revisit them this coming week. We will tie in some art projects like self-portraits to the Memoirs genre as well.

Civilization 

“Civ” encompasses history, geography, politics and economics. We are exploring the ancient world. We had fun yesterday discussing the most surprising fact we learned about our families, showing each other where we were born on the US map, then listening to a story about ancient Egypt, why nomads became farmers, and why rivers were appealing places to settle. Heroes were surprised to learn that the Nile river flows from south to north! Then we learned about why every world map is wrong because it’s impossible to translate a globe into a flat surface without some trade offs between shape and size.

Next week we will explore early writing forms and make papyrus!

Today was exhibition day! And it was exciting. The heroes invited parents to join for the exhibition of learning where they shared what they have been working on in the studio. They started with a demonstration of core skills. That was followed by an exhibition of completed poetry (odes, haiku and free verse). Everyone watch the lip dub video, enjoyed the hero boards, and we had a ceremony where each hero signed the contract of promises they have been crafting for the last six weeks, sealed with a toast of sparkling water!

Next Week is Exhibition Week! – the heroes are planning diligently for their upcoming exhibition. The heroes are very excited to invite parents to the studio and share their work with them!

What They Worked on This Week –  we don’t want to steal the heroes’ thunder before the exhibition, so this will be a brief update. This week they worked on writing odes as they continued their poetry exploration. Odes to sneakers, Odes to video games, Odes to skiing…..very fun and very creative! 

Heroes are also finishing up their hero boards! The heroes were very psyched about using their computers for this. They printed graphics and word labels. This coming week they will be more hands-on decorating the rest of their boards.

Journaling and core skills continued. This week, writing was worth more points than computer core skills, so we saw quite a few heroes attacking those journals! They are definitely getting into the rhythm of studio life.

Self-Governance – during this week’s Town Hall, the heroes addressed the issue of bringing toys and stuffed animals from home into the studio. These can be distracting, so they devised a system for addressing this. Ask them what they came up with! They were both warm-hearted and tough-minded about the issue.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the exhibition!

Makerspace:

The makerspace is a work-in-progress, but over time, we have been bringing in more supplies: cardboard, beads, yarn, wires, tubes, paints, etc. This week, our Guide did a lot of makerspace organizing in advance of our open house and the children will continue to explore and use the area more and more.

Our goal is to use it as a free space to create art and models in two and three-dimensions, and as a project room for Quests. Our intention is to design the makerspace such that it 1) facilitates projects in a way that they remain learner-driven (i.e. our heroes don’t need adult help to see or access materials); and 2) deepens engagement with the projects (i.e. is stocked with compelling materials and supplies related to our Quests).

As we continue to invest in the makerspace, we have tapped into the advice and planning resources of a professor of curriculum and instruction named Peter Wardrip. Peter helped design the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum makerspace and consults for museums across the country. We are so glad to have made this connection.

We have also been visiting makerspaces wherever we can. We’ve taken tours of the UW-Engineering makerspace, the Betty Brinn makerspace in Milwaukee, and the Sun Prairie Children’s Museum makerspace for inspiration and ideas.

This week, our heroes helped create a sign for the maker space utilizing loose materials like crayons, LEGOs and pipe cleaners. Through this project they will begin to take ownership of the space and feel welcome to utilize it more and more!

Hero’s Journey
This week the children circled back to exploring the hero’s journey. They considered what makes a hero a hero? what does it mean to be brave? and who are your heroes and why? They are preparing “hero boards” to explore these questions and also in preparation for the upcoming exhibition. They also considered these questions during journaling time (we began daily journaling this week).

Some Questions You Can Ask Your Hero:

What book did you read during D.E.A.R. today?

Who is your hero?

What do they do that makes them a hero?

What’s a “seed of potential?”

How do you earn points?

What do you earn with your points?

What’s a critique?

How are you using critiques at school?

You may notice more outdoor photos and photos in Fellowship Hall this week. We are aiming to start our mornings with activities in Fellowship Hall to help our learners get more energy out before going into the studio for launch at 8:30am. We’ve also lengthened outdoor time. Seems to be working so far as we’ve noticed better focus in the studio. Oh, and the heroes found the sledding hill!

Character call-outs!

One of the things we do at Acton is call out our fellow heroes when they impress us in their demonstration of positive character traits (if you haven’t already, ask your child(ren) about the “Gotcha” bowl).

We also embrace growth. Some of the areas where we are seeing growth in our heroes:

Leaders are emerging: we are seeing leaders emerge who are willing to hold their fellow heroes accountable (e.g. getting snow clothes on in a timely fashion, carrying sleds, focusing-in during activities). Leaders are also helpful, and we are seeing an ethos of community, helpfulness and supportiveness across all our learners.

Reading fluency: D.E.A.R. (drop everything and read) is paying dividends and our heroes may not even realize it. We have seen an improvement in the speed and fluency of reading, especially in our younger readers.

Independence: we are seeing a shift from looking for answers from adults, to seeking them from themselves and other heroes. One of the guidelines we have here is “BBBG,” which means, when you have a question, “check your brain, then a book, then a buddy, before the guide.” We see the heroes taking on more ownership of their own learning and exploration everyday.

Responsibility: with freedom comes great responsibility. We grant learners more agency at Acton than they would be afforded at a conventional school. So it’s our duty as Guides to make the guardrails (i.e. expectations and consequences) clear, so that learners can make a choice. We saw them all embrace that this week.

They are learning to make useful choices and embrace both having fun AND working hard.

Writer’s workshop:

We continue to explore poetry! Some questions / activities you can try with your child(ren) are:

1. What is a metaphor you remember from this week? Here are some common metaphors. Can you call it out if you hear a metaphor together this week?
2. What do you think about Haiku? Make up some haikus together (5 – 7 – 5 syllables). Read haikus together. Here are some haiku poems you can read together: Funny Haikus and Haiku for Kids.
3. Read poems together at home. We’ve definitely noticed our heroes enjoying Shel Silverstein this week.

Acton systems:

Part of our focus for these first six weeks is rolling out Acton systems. This week we put S.M.A.R.T. goals into system along with badge plans (ask your child what they chose as their badge avatar), and running partners (i.e. an accountability partner). These systems help put goal-setting and learning in the hands of heroes where over time, they take more and more responsibility over their own learning and growth. We have some work to do in this area! But that’s to be expected. We will keep practicing!

Next week: Diving deep into the hero’s journey with hero boards!