Welcome to a New School Year!

Students are settling in quite nicely and are already experiencing that feeling of being part of a strong and special community. Those first-day jitters are evolving into smiles, laughter, and a sense of comfort and belonging.

We've carefully and deliberately spent our first days of school not just establishing routines and expectations, but more importantly, creating a classroom that is built on community; where students recognize and celebrate shared goals and experiences, are learning to trust one another, feel empowered to contribute, and who feel understood, valued and capable. Those important traits will be nurtured all year long as they provide an essential foundation for developing teamwork, cooperation, communication, flexibility, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

We asked students to reflect on their experiences over the last several days and write about which ones they found most meaningful, which skills they nurtured in the process, and why and how those skills are important. Here are a handful of reflections from this week's guest bloggers. Enjoy.

My best learning experience so far has been the Cards & Castles challenges because they helped teach me how to deal with failure. Some important skills that I needed to use in order to complete this activity were perseverance (never giving up!) because you had to keep trying even when the castles collapsed. Also, we needed to be flexible in our thinking because there were some really tough times we went through and we had to be able to change the way we were thinking. In the real world, we'll have to find ways to engineer problems in many, many different ways. Experiences like Cards & Castles taught us how to work together to solve problems.   -@gamerhead41 

My best learning experience so far has been creating our Habits of Mind skits. I liked that we got to choose whether to present a skit or create a model. Some important skills that I needed to use in order to complete this activity were creativity to come up with an interesting idea for our skit; determination to keep going when things didn't work out the first time, and patience because I had to be patient when working with members of my group. Learning to work with others is pretty likely to happen a lot (in school and in your future job).    -@WritingMachine

My best learning experience this week was the Cards & Castles challenge. Some important skills that I needed to use in order to complete this activity were perseverance because we needed to keep trying no matter how hard it was to make our towers; creativity and teamwork because the challenges were really hard and we had to work together to keep creating structures that were different than the others. Practicing and developing these skills is important because in the real world and in our future jobs, we will have to work together and communicate in different ways with other people.    - @thesciencegeek     

My best learning experience so far has been the dialogical interviews. Getting to know each other, especially my partner, was helpful (and funny). Some important learning skills that I needed to use in order to complete this activity were listening closely to learn as much as I could about my partner and collecting data; and patience while I would wait for my partner to finish speaking. This experience was helpful because in the real world, we will need to collect data and actively listen to others.   - @seafoam-da-seawing