Welcome to our blog

This is the story of two educators on one journey. Each day we will record our reflections on the process of being involved in an innovative educational environment. The decision on our part to leave the public education system was deliberate due to our growing frustrations over the factory "one size fits all" model of education. This model has dominated the educational landscape and is not designed to meet the needs of the 21st century learner. Step one in our journey was to find a place that would allow us the freedom to break out of the system. We needed a chance to just breath and facilitate learning in the ways that we both know are best for children. That step has led us to Rosemary Beach Florida to work with the students attending the OH Institute. The OH Institute is a unique educational environment that we find humane. The curriculum focus is on the individual learner with an infusion of technology project based learning. Currently, it has 20 students in grades 4-11 all of whom are seeking something different than what the factory system of education has to offer. This is where our adventure begins...

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Friday November 5th

Randy-

The best part about today was definitely the excitement from both middle school and high school over their project ideas. Middle school is combining an entire theme with diaries from different conflicts in American history. They will be handwritten as they are from a time period that was before typing machines. Each diary will have a historically accurate tone and information. The cool thing is the idea that some will be incomplete or from multiple days and should contain a variety of entries. I'm looking forward to this product.

Elementary decided to study the digestive system today and they watched a video based on this. Afterwards, they made diagrams of digestive systems of different animals and wrote a story about what a piece of food would do as it passed through. Sort of gross, but fun at the same time. I'm going to put together more social studies oriented lessons on Monday.


Amy:

Today started with a parent meeting to talk about fundraising for the Costa Rica trip. The scarecrOH fundraiser was a huge success. We got 21 scarecrOHs and raised nearly $5,000. Whuhu!

After that I had what I call the disconnect meeting. It is such an engaging journey to be on in terms of hearing and seeing the different perspectives from everyone involved. I tried really hard to listen and at the same time explain where I feel we get mixed messages. It was a good meeting in terms of reinforcing the things that we are all seeing differently. It makes me wonder about the journey as a whole with my essential question being where is my heart?

After the meeting I did a book discussions with high school which was fun. It was interesting to watch the dynamics of the two groups as they worked.

I am glad it is Friday!

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