With Hurricane Matthew and a professional development day, we only had 3 days this past week to introduce some new ideas but I think you’ll see a trend.
After our first showcase evening, we marked the beginning of a new unit. With a new unit, comes a new theme: Challenging Ourselves and Supporting One Another. Of course, this theme is incorporated throughout our entire year. We are just choosing to have it be our main focus for the next six weeks.
And the students are already embracing it- they are challenging themselves to come up with new and interesting ideas for their inquiry project, challenging themselves and supporting each other through our new math and science units, and even during their P.E. exercises.
Our new science unit is going to incorporate not only science content, but also a majority of our reading and writing lessons as well. Who knew?! You don’t have to completely separate all subjects for students to learn effectively. Amazing!
The students are challenged by new concepts and skills such as annotating, text structure, and writing technique. But are also reading and writing with purpose.
Even though new things are usually exciting (for kids and adults alike), I was pleasantly surprised to see just how enthusiastic my students were about our new math and inquiry units. As we always do at the beginning of a unit, there is a pre-assessment. My students struggled greatly with this, which I reminded them IS OK as it assessed math skills needed to prepare for algebra. Skills such as accurate order of operations and simplifying equations.
The difference here, they were not discouraged by this. They knew from our last pre-assessment that these were not like traditional schools where the questions didn’t relate or that the scores would be meaningless, but they knew that I would genuinely use it as a means to decide what needed to be taught.
So when we started to really break down the concepts, they immediately took over and embraced it. They jumped up and without ANY prompting from me, began helping each other (remember the theme?). Simply put, this made me a very happy teacher.
These kids are getting it. They know that they are all unique and have individual needs. They know that they all learn in different ways. They have no trouble telling me, and each other, what works and what doesn’t. They know that learning this material will not be easy, but they know that they can do it.
Yet another new and exciting aspect of this unit is the opportunity the older cohort has for their inquiry project. They will be participating in the Future City Program. This is a project-based learning program where students “imagine, research, design, and build cities of the future.”
Future City incorporates aspects of engineering, science, math, reading, writing, public speaking, and art. The students meet with an engineer once a week, who will act as their mentor for the project. Real-world learning and insight from someone in the field- exactly the kind of experiences we want for our students!
We almost couldn’t believe how well this program alligns with ours. The students already discussed how similar our Inquiry cycle is to Future City’s engineering design process. Through the process, students will identify a problem, brainstorm solutions, design their city (using a computer program SimCity), build it (from limited resources), test it, improve, and redesign, and finally share it.
The ‘sharing’ in this case will be at the Regional Future City Competition in January. Yes, there is a competitive portion of this program and yes, the kids were VERY excited about that part.
Students will still be able to share their progress on their city with their families at our next Showcase Evening in November. At that point, their computer design should be completed.
This week, the students already began brainstorming and researching ideas for their city; this year’s challenge is The Power of Public Space. Some of them were spouting out ideas so fast, I couldn’t keep up with writing them down! They recorded their ideas in ways that worked for them- on paper or on a word document. Ideas related to sustainable energy sources for their city, water treatment options, and enertainment such as parks and concert venues.
Again, they shocked me with their enthusiasm and depth of thought. Just like with their math unit, this program could seem daunting (they acknowledged, “This is going to be a lot of work!”-B.R.), but they are not discouraged by this.
They are ready to accept the challenge.
A couple other new and exciting things that happened this week: the first music lesson at NoiseMakers and the creation of our Indi-ED values mural! More on those coming soon!