The Weekly Newsletter
Week 32, May 22-26
Welcome back! I can’t believe our school year is almost over and we are already almost into summer session! For the last week of the session, we went out with a bang. The foundation studio worked so hard to finish projects and get all requirements checked off for a movie party! The navigator studio practiced true self-reflection and accountability with a major change of pace/ method of setting personal goals. More on this later….read on to hear more!
Here at Acton, we all work as a community and as individuals to constantly explore our gifts, passions, and curiosities….both personally and in relation to the world around us. Sometimes life gets challenging, and we begin to forget about the journey while we focus only on the destination. This week the navigators got the opportunity to check back in with themselves and ask WHY they are doing this. Why is learning about the Vietnam War important to them? Why is mastering the quadratic formula going to be useful to them down the road? So we offered for them to choose the assignments they felt are important to them and their journeys. No required completion for badges…no deadlines. The initial reaction was panic, as they are their own biggest critics. The product of this was almost exactly the same as every other week… every assignment requested and completed by Friday. We were not surprised 🙂
The personal finance quest wrapped up this week! The weekly assignments were as follows: they continued their monthly food cost exploration and priced out everything they eat in a week, then transferred that into a monthly food bill. Next, they played The Game of Life and wrote a reflection on how they believe or do not believe it mimics real life and holds up to its name. Last, each student randomly chose a major life event from a cup that would either benefit them or set them back. It was a great ice breaker into the world of unexpected curveballs and how to learn to navigate them without giving up!
The physics quest is a wrap! The foundation Eagles have all built their final pieces of playground equipment and we can’t wait for you to see them at the Exhibition of Learning!
The foundation studio has been trying out a new learning site called IXL. This site offers practice in many subjects, and we will be using it for math and language arts. This will give the students an extra area to practice their skills in, wherever and whenever they want! So far, the Eagles have been using it as an addition to Khan where they can practice a skill and then test it for mastery!
For the final journalism project in the navigator studio, the students wrote news articles for the Acton Academy Newspaper. As a group, we will be creating this newspaper. This week each student was asked to pitch an idea for an article, get sign off on it, and write! There were some really awesome articles that came in!
This week in the biography quest, we explored further into introductions and what makes them great. The foundation students practiced identifying the critical parts of an intro- like character details, setting, and the goals and desires of the hero you’re writing about. They put the hook they wrote last week together with this info and ended up with excellent introduction paragraphs! When they were finished with this, they continued their drafting process.
In navigator history, our book took us through parts of the Cold War. Some things we researched and learned about were Nixon, Watergate, the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars), and Reagan.
In history for foundation, the students continued to learn about life after WW1. This included the Great Depression and what the United States went through as a result of events in the previous decade- the Wall Street Crash and Black Tuesday, and the shift of the country as Franklin D. Roosevelt took office after Herbert Hoover. Along with US history, the students learned about Hitler’s rise to power. They learned about how greatly our great depression effected Europe as well, especially Germany. And how being weak and poor as a country can lead to unjust powers rising up.
We celebrated a very special birthday this week…Carly’s! It was awesome to be able to celebrate such a special person. Carly has been at Acton since our very first year and she is such an important part of our little school. We are so thankful for the gifts Carly shares with our community and we wish her a very happy birthday and year to come!
We ended the week with an AWESOME Friday. We had our end of the year shell shop where the students were able to spend their hard-earned shells to buy awesome items picked out by our student council and Dani! We also had ‘Pizza Friday’, and the foundation studio won themselves a movie/popcorn party by fulfilling all the requirements this session! We watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and it was just a great way to end the session.
We hope you all have a wonderful break and we will see you in a week for the summer session!
