We’ve had a wonderful week here at Acton Academy Madison West. The newest heroes are settling in very well and having a lot of fun, while the experienced heroes are stepping up as leaders and welcoming the new dynamics of a bigger group and varied personalities. Already, the children held their first joint Spark-Discovery town hall to address an issue in the free time area. Together, they developed a system for keeping major building works-in-progress in the free-time area safe from destruction 🙂
During this first session, the heroes are “building their tribe,” focused on team-building, collaborative challenges, creating studio contracts, and introducing Acton processes and systems. A focus of this week was a collaborative lip dub challenge which the children will submit to the annual Acton Film Fest!
The lip dub challenge is 100% learner-led over four days and involved all Discovery and Spark heroes. The children storyboarded, planed, choreographed, created their own props in the makerspace, and filmed and edited the video themselves. The heroes worked hard, had fun, encountered frustrations, and in the end, created a fantastic school-wide lip dub video. They are very proud of their work!
To measure progress and excellence, the children created a rubric for measuring excellence based off what they observed from world-class examples of other school lip dubs. After filming, they would come back to the studio, watch the video, and rate it against their rubric, and determine what they needed to improve in the next take. We use this process of draft and critique regularly at Acton.
Some of the things you can ask your child(ren) about this week:
- Lip dub video process. What was the most fun part? What challenges did you encounter and how did you course correct? What’s a rubric and how did you use it to critique your video?
- How do you measure excellence?
- How do you know when you are finished with a project?
- What put you in your challenge zone this week? What put you in your panic zone? How did you deal with that?
- What’s a character call-out? How does it feel to give one? How does it feel to receive one?
- What book have you been reading during D.E.A.R? Would you recommend it to others? Why or why not?
- Why are you wearing a rubber band on your wrist? What’s the human knot? And what’s the disappearing guide game?
