Instead of sitting at a desk taking exams for the past few weeks, we have done a lot of significant work and had fun at the same time.
We have gone to the Dali museum, had “Circle Day” while calculating pi, worked on Indi-(t)ED Talk Interviews, and went to USF all in two weeks. Overall, we feel like we are learning more. Instead of teachers teaching only for good grades, ours want to teach us about the curriculum but also about the real world and how learning can be fun. Many kids at regular schools just started having fun, but we have learned this way all year.
This past week we went to the Dali museum because we’re working on an art project that is similar. Even though some of us have been there before, we still learned a lot about the paintings because the audio tour was full of information. One painting even talked about DNA, which connected to our main science topic for the month. Our favorite part was the virtual reality, Dreams of Dali. We got to take a virtual trip through one of Dali’s paintings and some of the reactions were awesome! Overall, it was a great school experience!
As we mentioned last week, we have been working hard on Indi-(t)ED Talks. We wanted to do something different.
Mrs. Laurenzi and Ms. Heller thought we should follow what real TED Talk presenters would do. As part of the process, we had interviews with the teachers, parents, then students. We were interviewed to get feedback on our original ideas and get approval for our main topics. But of course, we did it Indi-ED Style! In my opinion, it was more fun than I thought it would be. It was fun because it made us feel more mature and we got the chance to discuss a topic that we think is important for other people to know.
Last Wednesday, we went to the USFSP library to continue our study of genetics. We all love when we go to USFSP because we get to study what life is like there for the students (not to mention that the library is really nice). We all loved being in the library with all the students, it almost felt like we were one of them. We got so much information about genetics that we probably won’t even get to use everything we learned (this school year at least)! We hope to go back in the near future to learn even more! That’s another difference, our teachers listen to our ideas. We mentioned on a survey that we enjoyed the college experiences so Ms. Heller thought about how to arrange that for us.
This is the way we work. Hard until the end, not just for a test.