Many of the methods we use in our courses are evidence-based and kid-approved. Remarkably, these are not mutually exclusive. Often these methods make it easier for struggling students to succeed, and for achieving students to exceed – which is a win-win in our books!
Let’s look at our English Language Arts (ELA) coursework. This was one of our student, Claire’s, favorite classes. The image above from her journal is evidence of her love.
Upper Elementary students start preparing for middle school with an extra set of classes that are available to them on Wednesdays. For example, our Junior Great Books class inspired Claire’s artwork.
Every week, Claire came in with her questions about the story. She was excited to put them up on the board when she walked in. In our organization, students know that nobody can make fun of them here, and it frees them up to share. As we talked about the story – asking the STUDENTS posted questions – they all dove in to find their evidence. In the beginning of the year, this inspired Claire and another student to celebrate by creating an “evidence dance”. They did the dance every time they found evidence in the stories that would prove or disprove something. And they can dance here…
Drawing is fun. Writing on the board is fun. Dancing is fun.
Can fun ALSO be educational?
What they don’t realize is that all of this is encouraging skills we value. Public speaking, collaborative discussion and respectful discourse, analyzing text, citing text evidence, and more.
Additionally, there are the many topics that the stories themselves raise. Then there is the vocabulary that goes with those topics. For example, last year Claire’s class learned about taxation (thanks to a medieval story that included a tax collector). They grappled with whether stealing just what you need to eat was the same as any other theft. They pondered whether an animal characters disgust for another animal character was similar to racism.
These are THEIR ideas. We explore THEIR ideas. Simply put: we weave ELA skills into what they are wondering about and exploring. We explore more social studies and science-related topics drawn from our stories. The conversations go where the students take it, and that buys their engagement to helping them learn these necessary skills.
If you have read The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–and How to Fix it by Natalie Wexler then you realize how evidence shows how this kind of integrated learning builds better comprehension of higher level content later on. Again… the kids are happy and they are building skills in ways that the schools often disregard despite being evidence-based.
And this is where our students start…
Of course, students who come to us later than elementary are still exposed to the same foundational skills through their individual content. The focus of all of our coursework is working collaboratively, thinking, analyzing, explaining, citing their evidence for all of it, becoming comfortable with making mistakes, and learning to recover from them and move forward. We address the whole student, not JUST academics or JUST social-emotional needs or JUST one part of them. We include parents because we are in partnership with them as they raise and educate their children. Families are an enormous part of their lives.
We’d love for your family to become part of our community…
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