A week in Pearl

Each week, collaborators send home a message from the building to their families. They curate photos and stories to illustrate their students’ experiences during the week to give families that insight into the Brightworks life, and we use the blog to illuminate these experiences for the rest of the community. This week, we highlight Daphne and the Pearl Band (11-13 year olds).

Choose Your Own Monster Adventure Pop-Up Book

We spent the week fully focusing on beginning to edit and share our joint stories, illustrate and create our pop-up pages, and transitioned into the creation of our own individual stories. This took up the majority of our time and is a great intro into the world of peer feedback and the creation of multiple iterations.

Yoga and mindfulness

We continued adding more poses to our repertoire and I was asked not by one but TWO students if we could increase our yoga practice from 2 days to 3 days a week. A request I never thought I'd hear from a middle schooler. When possible, I will add in another short practice throughout the week.

US Indian Boarding Schools

We watched a short film on the Canadian Indian Act and the bureaucracy of getting your official "status" as an indigenous person. As many of the stories we are reading take place in Canada, I thought it would be interesting for them to see that government shortcomings as they relate to indigenous people are not limited to the US government. We had a really in depth conversation afterwards around indigenous land rights, mining, and the risks associated currently for indigenous environmental activists.

Band Buddies

Pearls and Diamonds drew outline sketches of one another then turned them into monsters. The relationships seem to only deepen by the week and I'm continually impressed by how sweet and gentle the Pearls are with their buddies.