Badge Celebration:
We had our first badge celebration this week! Each hero earned a Business Fair Badge. Every Friday we will hold a badge ceremony to celebrate heroes who earn a badge that week! The Guides created a badge wall where the children will be able to display their badges as they earn them!
D.E.A.R.
At this week’s Town Hall meeting, the children requested that during drop everything and read (D.E.A.R.) time that they have the opportunity to read aloud to each other. We love this idea for improving both fluency for the reader, and vocabulary for the listener. So the children started what we are calling “collaborative D.E.A.R.” on Thursdays. Book buddies would have been a catchier name 🙂
Spring is in the Air:
The children have been spending lunches outside and enjoying the outdoors. They are determined to climb the tree outside our building and have been giving each others boosts to help. We love the teamwork!
In honor of the changing weather, we made barometers out of jars, balloons and straws, and learned about how air pressure changes as weather changes. We will be tracking air pressure with our barometers!
Memoirs:
The heroes published their memoirs this week! This was a huge area of growth this session as the children went from struggling with writer’s block during the first week to publishing a booklet of memoirs. Ask your child to share theirs with you!
Civilization:
This week we learned about Assyria, India and China and read myths from each culture! Next session we will be exploring STEM challenges related to ancient civilizations (think mummification and Roman aqueducts).
Special Visitor:
This week we had a special visitor named Sumeyra come and visit! She led a STEM project (the walking rainbow) and shared her hero story with us. Sumeyra was born in Germany and lived in Turkey. She has traveled to 24 countries and taught in a remote part of Turkey (it took her two hours to get to the schoolhouse every day on rough, dirt roads. She had to tend to the fire in the school house, and the children didn’t have boots or books). How grateful we are for all we have! The children enjoyed learning about her life and her adventures and even spoke Turkish with her through Google translate 🙂
Failure & Success:
We have seen huge growth this past session in understanding that our actions and decisions have consequences. This runs the gamut from arriving to launches and discussions on time and prepared to tracking our points for core skills. At times, this has been rough and every hero has felt successes and failures. We celebrate both!
The Guides worked a lot this past session to put systems in place where there are both rewards and consequences, so that we can get out of the way and let the learners learn from their mistakes and take responsibility for their learning. Here are some successes and failures and lessons learned:
- Making it to our freedom level goal!
- Not making it to our freedom level goal, but accepting that and strategizing around what we have to do to make it next time
- Not arriving to launch “on time and prepared” and therefore earning an “X”
- Learning that mopping is actually quite fun!
- Bouncing back from the X and earning a “check” next time!
- Earning Friday Reward which is a blast!
- Sinking into a great book that we are excited to read
- Reflecting on the accomplishment of building a business and earning a real profit. The heroes all agreed the best part was having fun!
- Feeling the pride of reading our completed memoirs aloud to our friends
- Feeling the failure of not having finished memoirs when our friends did, not liking that feeling, and committing to focusing better during Writer’s Workshop next session
- Losing our memoirs work in a disorganized desk and learning that maybe there is value to using an organizational system afterall 🙂
- Embracing that we have more agency and control over the trajectory of our learning than we understood before
Next session, the Guides have more plans to make core skills goals and progress even more explicit to the learners, to help them better understand where they are, and where they are heading in their badge plans. We’ll continue to explore 360 feedback and personal goals. And we will continue to look for ways to delegate more responsibility to the learners. They are doing a great job and we’re really excited about how they are ALL becoming culture carriers of the Acton culture.
Looking Ahead to Session Three:
Entomology! The next Quest is all about bugs! We will continue to explore ancient civilizations including Africa, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria and Greece! We will explore science-based fiction writing. The outdoor challenge will continue! We have visual art projects and STEM challenges planned and are exploring fun PE activities. And we will have lots of Friday mystery rewards and outdoor exploration now that the weather is warming up. See you after Spring Break!
