Orange Band: Seed, Week 5
As I look through the pictures from this week, I see projects coming to completion, and the sprouts of new projects emerging.
While older students will work on individual projects as we shift to expression, we will have a couple of group projects. We brainstormed a laundry list of project ideas, and then narrowed down and combined ideas where we could. We will work on 2-3 projects at a time, so that kiddos can choose which project they want to work on on different days. Our projects are creative, involve building and physical manifestations, represent a deeper understanding and larger scope than explorative projects, and are chosen by the students. I'm pumped.
A few other highlights from this week: our first trip to the Treat Commons Garden! I arranged for us to contribute to this garden over the summer, and now that we're finished with our storage unit, we have time to go every week. This garden focuses mostly on growing food. There is a mix of private and communal plots, and much of the food grown in the communal plots supports a program that provides free boxes of fresh produce for members of the community. We'll spend our Class Meeting time, each Wednesday morning, in the garden. We'll learn some chores and ways we can contribute to the communal plots, do some community building, social, and emotional learning activities. Based on what is needed by the group at the time, our focus will shift from communication, tenacity, peer pressure, friendship, and advocacy for yourself and others--just to name a few topics.
We've also talked a lot this week about how we work. We watched a bit of this video (bullets 2, 4, 7, 8, 9 and 10; not all of the video is kid friendly) which outlines some guidelines for studio assistants from the artist Tom Sachs' studio. I highly recommend! Ask your kiddo about sacred spaces, and Elsa--she's very thorough. As we get ready to declare our project ideas, it's important for us to establish how we will do this work: we will treat our workspaces as if they were sacred, we will be thorough, we will work from a plan, we will own our mistakes in order to learn from them, and we will be persistent.