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.
