book arc projects

We've been back from winter break for a week and projects are really starting to pick up steam! At Brightworks, we have become more deliberate about project time and have set out several parameters that students must meet in order to be able to work on their own, completely independent project for the arc.

Students working on independent projects...- Take initiative.- Seek challenges outside your comfort zone.- Embrace assigned work, even if you’re not initially excited by it.- Finish tasks.- Remember responsibilities without being reminded. Come prepared.- Choose to bring work home.- Seek and incorporate feedback.- Show resilience in the face of failure.- Treat others with love, respect and consideration.

Many students reach this point and, with the help and guidance of their collaborator, plan their independent project work for the arc. Most of the students in the Indigo Band are at this point, working on screenplay adaptations of books, short story collections, or memoirs. The Green Band is also dividing into smaller independent projects that are direct offshoots of the experts and experiences from the exploration phase of the Book arc.But during expression for the Book arc, many students are choosing to work with their band on a group project, a single idea or goal that each student finds an individual pathway to. These group projects are independent projects in disguise, but provide collaborators with a greater ability to manage eight complex pathways and give students the best opportunity to succeed as they work through both the project itself and project management skills that they may not have perfected yet.For example, the Orange Band as a whole is working on a creating a computer game based on the story arc and using the coding that they have been learning from Gever, and each student is taking a route to that end goal with a different approach - text adventure or choose-your-own-adventure story - and their own plotlines.The project for the Blue Band is a book of the school year, based on all eight students' blog posts since the beginning of the last arc. They have divided up the various events and experiences since September - the Mendocino trip, the Rosetta comet landing sleepover, various building projects, NaNoWriMo, etc - and are using the grammar and writing lessons that Phillip has been giving them to write a narrative of their band in third person.The Yellow Band is doing a group project but each writing their own version of a zine with original writing and illustration from their arc. They are experimenting with making paper out of different materials for their covers and have been composing fiction and drawings for their pages.Students in the Red Band are collaborating to create a coauthored book about love and friendship. They are brainstorming together and splitting up the responsibilities of writing and illustrating a book, taking inspiration from their author study on Mo Willems. The book, they hope, will become a guidebook for incoming students next year and years after, and are playing with the idea of including ideas about love and friendship from older students at Brightworks.We are excited to watch these projects develop and unfold, as well as continue to foster project management skills in our students as they iterate, create, explore, and do.