Kids are naturally curious about the world around them and inherently WANT to learn. When they’re given rewards (sticker charts, gold stars, candy, toys) for learning, as is common practice at so many schools, this intrinsic motivation is taken away and replaced by the reward given behavior. Kids learn to expect a reward every time they do something “good” and become wholly unmotivated and complacent. In short, that’s why we don’t believe in rewards here! The kids do work that is meaningful because it’s driven by them. They’re learning because they want to, and sometimes, don’t even know they are.  A great example is the children’s self-chosen project: The Sara Curry Restaurant

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The reviews are in…Sara Curry Restaurant earns 5 stars!

We had a very special visit this past week from Alan Cumming and Grant Shaffer. They have co-written and illustrated a book about their two dogs, titled “The Adventures of Honey & Leon” and came to read to us. The kids were enchanted by the story, which had lots of adventure, humor, and real life commentary. They also gave us an exclusive preview of their next book, which features Honey and Leon on a new adventure in Scotland. It was powerful for the kids to get to meet a real life author and illustrator, as they got a view into the process behind creating a book, which they do almost daily! They had lots of insightful questions for them, and only positive reviews!

Last week, the children were allowed to separate from the teachers, and by themselves they were asked to decide what their final presentation should be. Children took on various roles in the meeting, someone volunteered to chair it and take votes. They wrote lists of ideas, including writing a book, making a documentary, creating a model of a beach, and then they voted and created a graph of the votes.  The final decision was to make a documentary, all this without help from teachers!

This week, the kids titled the documentary “Beach” and listed the topics it should cover. They each chose one and researched, brainstormed, drew, and wrote about their topic. Then, they began writing scripts and gathering props. Later they set up lights and film.  They invited an editor to come in and help edit it with them.

 Each week we spend time studying writing topics and developing our own books. The kids have learned everything from author biographies to dedication pages. Recently we studied character development. We started out using our very own class caterpillars to base our characters off of. We then thought about 5 characteristics for each one, fleshing out who each caterpillar character would be in our story! The kids got to spend the time thinking about things that make up a character, which brought up things like fear and love. They have really developed a fascination with this idea and you can see this in how much work they put into their finished books.