Session 6 Week 5 in Review

Elementary Studio

Session 6 has ended! Only one session remains for the 2022–2023 school year! This session was full of hard work, time, management, collaboration, and creativity! To conclude this session, learners participated in a dress rehearsal to help them prepare for Exhibition! Elementary learners were resilient to finalize their presentations in time for the exhibition! If you ask me, this session's exhibition was by far the greatest one yet! It was full of personality and laughter. During our retrospectives, we journaled, reflected on exhibition feedback, selected one challenge that required the most design thinking, and celebrated our studio's accomplishments! Shout out to Shelby for earning the school-wide Learn To Be Award! Shelby has stepped into being an accountability partner for the whole Studio. This session in particular she has been extremely consistent in leaning into this strength. She asks questions that encourage her learners to grow just as if she were the Guide. She is a pleasure to have in the Elementary Studio each day! I'd like to give another shout out to all the elementary learners. This is the first session every learner has earned not just one badge, but at least three! Way to go Elementary Studio! We concluded our Geography Civilization by creating unique flags to represent the different states we live in. Each flag had to include symbols, colors, and descriptions explaining what each color/symbol represents. During Story Arts, we participated in a listening party! Each group shared their finalized song with the studio and received feedback from a peer using the songwriter rubric. What a fun way to end our session! Session 7, here we come! (edited) 

Middle School Studio + HS Story Arts & Civ

Six sessions down and one to go! It’s really hard to believe that we are down to our last session of the year, but first, I want to take a moment to celebrate the accomplishments of this last week. First, congrats to our Session 6 award winners: Rico for Learn to Be and Gabriel for Learn to Learn! Congratulations to all of our learners who competed in the Shark Tank Exhibition; it was a tough Quest, but you all did a really wonderful job on your Design Thinking prototypes! Lastly, well done to our learners who wrapped up their Civ projects in time to star in our watch party video! All around Session 6 was a great session with growth demonstrated in all of our learners!Quest wrapped up this week with our Shark Tank Exhibition. Learners had between 5-8 minutes to share their individual journey through the Design Thinking process, which was a pretty tough challenge! Then, they needed to share their final prototype, explain how their prototype solves their users’ problem, and appeal to the Shark Tank judging panel (our Exhibition guests), why their prototype should be chosen! Congratulations to the winners from each breakout room: Simon, Brayden, Rico, and Caitlin! Everyone should be very proud of completing this Quest; it was a massive accomplishment!

This session’s Civ concluded with a 1773-style Tea Party, where learners were invited to bring their tea (or other beverage) and snacks, to watch the “Mix Tape” of all of learner’s pre-recorded Flipgrid videos. In the videos, learner’s showed off their paper bags and the artifacts they found or created. There were some truly unique and impressive artifacts presented, such as a 3D printed war cannon, the flag of the 13 colonies made out of melted beads, handmade portraits and painting of Revolutionary War scenes, feather quills, and more! The Mix Tape is available in both Studio’s Google Classrooms to enjoy!

Our Songcraft Story Arts came to a close with one last work session for music production teams to finish up any songwriting, recording, editing, and final preparations to have their song completed. While this Story Arts was fun in nature, it challenged learners to organize together as a team by dividing up tasks. Some teams needed to have tough conversations about how to move forward when team members couldn’t attend class or weren’t pulling their weight. As valuable as the skills they learned in songcrafting are, I believe the ultimate takeaways from this session’s Story Arts were collaboration, empathy, and trust!

High School Studio

Session 6 has officially come to an end! This week was full of laughs, banter, and lots of elbow grease getting Quests exhibition finished. Learners started the week journaling their thoughts and emotions, focusing on session 6 as a whole. We asked ourselves, “Why was this the work I chose? What did it feel like as I was working on it? How did working on this develop or display entrepreneurship?” In the afternoon, we had our Exhibition Dress rehearsal, and learners went into their appointed breakout rooms and helped guide each other through their presentations, and statements.
Exhibition was such a success! Learners and guardians came and enjoyed each other’s Entrepreneurship slideshows. Shoutout : Congrats to Shriya for getting the Session 6 Student Award!!