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What Does It Mean to Be Responsible?

Weekly Reflection

This week we introduced Weekly Reflection on Friday to give Warriors the opportunity to think about three things: What went well this week? What could be improved and why? How will they implement these changes? 

Our Warriors’ Weekly Reflections

Their answers showed that at such a young age our children know what is needed for their growth. With absolutely no input from guides/adults their answers were amazing to hear! One learner admitted she needed to take discussions more seriously and pay attention, while another learner decided she will stop switching subjects during core-skills time and instead build focus on one subject before moving on to another. One of them announced that instead of just flipping through pictures during DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) time she will actually try to read each page before jumping to the next. The Acton culture that once felt too ideal to be true is proving its worth at Tej Acton Academy.

Witnessing this in our Weekly Reflection time brought to light one of our Guiding Principles:

“Children can be in charge of their own learning if motivated and equipped.”

Accountability, Points Board and Friday Fun

Our Points System Board

As we wrap up our third week (halfway through our first session!), our learners have become more adjusted to our schedule here at Tej Acton Academy and continue to take everything we give them in stride. At the beginning of this week, they reviewed our accountability system once again, further understanding the importance of being responsible for their own actions while also encouraging good habits for others. With the accountability system now in place, our Warriors have gotten the hang of not only judging their own efforts in areas such as discussion, core skills, PE and art, etc., but also offering constructive criticism to one another, too. The points come in during these evaluations, as each learner can earn a maximum of 3 points in each category. The following is our breakdown of what each number of points means: 1 — learner is unable to participate in activities and instead distracts the group, 2 — learner completes some work or tasks but still has room to improve, and 3 —  learner is focused and succeeds in giving their best work. 

Currently, Ms. Shah and I elected to have a “Friday Fun” event for the group if at the end of the week if each learner were to surpass a given threshold of points; alternatively, if only one or two learners surpasses that threshold, those two are given a designated amount of free time only. From what we have noticed, this form of collective “grading” without the pressure that instantly comes with receiving A’s, B’s, and C’s greatly contributes to the learning environment by creating healthy competition; instead of a learner feeling like they have to perform better than someone else, they are motivated to do their own best and support their group’s growth as well.

Contract Game and “I Promise…”

Our Contract Game Board!

Grasping accountability is not always an easy feat for children at first, but what helped us the most in doing so was incorporating the Contract Game as much as possible (check out our last blog post to learn what it is!). Our game board is split into 3 sections: Lab (Ideas we’re trying), Ideas (Promises we haven’t tried yet), Results (Our Community Contract). This week, our learners moved over two promises to our official Community Contract and decided to try out two new ideas: “I promise… to learn something new every day” and “I promise…to be honest.” 

As you may notice, these promises are not simple to follow, but we were amazed with how committed our learners were to holding each other accountable to follow them.  This truly brought to light another one of our Guiding Principles:

 “Children follow rules if they own them and are clear about their consequences.”

Writer’s Workshop

The last highlight of this week was our Writer’s Workshop: we built upon our previous lesson of poetry from our Writer’s Workshop last time and introduced haikus and free verse. Diving even further into the figurative language within poems, the learners also watched a video about similes and metaphors. In turn, these lessons expanded their knowledge on both the definition of a poem and its contents, offering them additional freedom when writing their own poems that will be shown at our Exhibition. Our Warriors also learned about Maya Angelou for our Hero Wall; check out what they learned! 

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