What did your school experience teach you about storytelling? Year 2 Week 24 in review
What a fun start to Session 6!
Details below.
Middle School Update
What did your school experience teach you about storytelling?
You probably gained some experience crafting five paragraph essays, book reports, and term papers. Maybe you learned how to write a personal narrative, or perhaps you completed a unit in poetry. Here at The Forest School, we don’t have a writing curriculum, we have storytelling projects.
Our learners encounter a range of genres and modes. They gain experience in crafting essays, letters, and articles. They also write screenplays, illustrate graphic novels, and create podcasts. We see storytelling as a bundle of key skills for 21st century learners. Whether you’re writing a pitch, reviewing a product, building an app, or writing a research proposal, you have to know how to tell a compelling story.
What our varied storytelling projects have in common is the process. Each project starts by identifying an audience. Who are we telling this story to and why? We then look at world-class examples. What does a professional podcast sound like? How do professional food critics craft their reviews? After looking at a variety of exemplars, learners are presented with a set of frameworks and formulas they can use to guide their work. And then they write. They brainstorm and draft, get feedback, draft some more, get more feedback, revise once again, and submit their piece for professional review. A grader will provide feedback, and learners will have one last chance to revise their work. After that, they submit their work for peer approval and publication to a real audience.
This session, learners are gaining experience at navigating this whole process on their own. They get to choose what they’re making - they have the freedom to take on any genre and topic in any medium. This week, they’ve chosen their projects, found numerous world-class examples, and have identified mentors in the field that can give them feedback on their work. Moving forward, they’ll explore the tricks of the trade - the various formulas and “how-to’s” for their projects. And then they’ll start making, revising, re-making, and so on. Along the way, they’ll become stronger storytellers, with a variety of storytelling experiences across a variety of projects, directed toward a variety of audiences and published in a variety of places.
Elementary Update
"An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots." -Charles F. Kittering
As we wrap up black history month, elementary heroes have been studying African American inventors and how those inventions changed the world. Next week we will step into the shoes of inventors and dive into the “Design Thinking” process, before creating inventions ourselves. Design thinking is a solution-based approach to solving problems, and a key learner outcome at The Forest School.
Some think that children are just too young to solve real world problems. We beg to differ, and believe that they are uniquely poised to solve problems that exist in their world. The young inventor Sophie Broderick, a ten-year-old from Connecticut, created the “Chemo Thera Pop” after watching her grandmother suffer with mouth sores from Chemotherapy. She created a popsicle that soothed the painful sores and was infused with nutrients to supplement her grandmother’s depleted appetite. GENIUS!!!
Are our heroes capable of such discoveries? Of course they are. We are here to guide and encourage our studios to think outside of the box and follow the road less traveled. I am enthusiastically waiting to see how our elementary heroes decide to change the world. Happy Inventing!
High School Update
Welcome to Session 6, the Theater Quest!
This week heroes launched into the 2nd to last session of the school year. The end is near. This session's Quest is broken into three teams: business, acting, and backstage. Heroes began their journey and can’t wait to see the final project.
Margaret Mead once said, "Children must be taught how to think, not what to think." The middle and high school continue to support one another as they build community through mentorship, teaching one another how to think outside, inside, and around the box. In addition, heroes began their second essay of the year using MLA format.
In preparation for the field trip to The Legacy Museum, high school heroes took on the heavy topic of mass incarceration. By definition, civilization is the process by which a society or place reaches an advanced stage of social and cultural development and organization. At The Forest School, high school heroes took on the challenge of figuring out how to minimize, eradicate, and close the inequality gap of mass incarceration. No small task. Benjamin Franklin once said, "Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning."
Onward!
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