Week 8 10/20-10/26
From the Spark Studio
From Miss Anna: We had a productive and jam-packed week back in the Spark Studio! The Heroes jumped right in on Tuesday and got to work. I was amazed at how many of them, of their own accord, headed to new materials and worked on mastering them. There was lots of internal motivation and joy as they took ownership over their own learning!
This session we are learning about citizenship and community building. We started off by helping the Heroes figure out their place, geographically, in the world. We went on a space adventure, thanks to Google Earth (you may be getting requests to do Google Earth in your homes this weekend). After blasting off and heading into space to see what the Earth looks like, we slowly zoomed in to North America, then the United States, then Utah, Bountiful and finally our school. They were so excited and would have explored the globe all day if we had the time! I am so excited we’re getting to this point in our culture – being able to follow their interests, be flexible with our schedule and experience the joy of discovery!
From Paul in the Creator Studio
What started out as an art program, evolved to a creator studio. This past week I introduced Creator badges this week. There will be about 20 creator badges. Each creator badge takes 4-5 weeks (a session length) to complete. So I didn’t overwhelm our heroes with choices, I introduced 3 badges for this session: sculpture, computer aided design (CAD & 3D printing), and penmanship. Your hero needs to choose one of these for this session and stick with it. There is no jumping around amongst badges. When they choose a badge, they stick with it and put forth their best effort!
From the Elementary Studio
From Kara: We began our detective quest this week! Someone stole some important files from the chief detective’s office, and the heroes’ job is to figure out who it was! They used each other as resources to answer their questions and progress on their quest as they honed observation skills and analyzed fingerprints.
From JeVonne: Beyond watching the heroes engage in this captivating new quest (which is all I took pictures of!), I loved watching the heroes jump right back into owning their learning environment. New squad leaders eagerly accepted their roles and I witnessed them rise to the challenge in simple ways such as guiding their squad in studio maintenance.
The heroes decided that they will be leading Town Hall from now on and then determined that there should be a pathway to earn that greater responsibility. They went on to define that pathway.
As a studio we focused on a better understanding of our math program and an awesome highlight was hearing a group of heroes ask for more core skills so they could work on math!
It was truly joyful to be back with our heroes and watch them jump right back into the swing of learning!