Sept 2020 at AWS

Sept 2020 Parent Newsletter: 

We have had such an amazing start to our school year.  Already (at the time I write this, we’ve only been in session for a week and a half), we are starting to settle into our rhythm.  We have had our struggles (with technology and a slow internet connection, for one) and our accomplishments (making homemade apple pie from scratch).  We’re getting really good at washing dishes by hand (our dishwasher is supposed to arrive Oct 10th).  We’ve constructed a ‘village’ in the woods, and new building sites pop up daily.

The students have taken the past week to explore and map the property-  they’ve already learned so much about the forest and creatures that inhabit it.  We’ve observed garter snakes, a red belly snake, toads, leopard frogs, gray tree frogs, chickadees, american goldfinches, hairy woodpeckers, nuthatches and heard barred owls disagreeing in our woods.  Mr. Thor and Mr. Aaron have helped us identify poison ivy and poison oak so we can point it out and avoid it!

We’ve enjoyed daily meditation time, where we focus on relaxing our bodies and our mind, and find ourselves riding the backs of hummingbirds, floating on crystals in a healing pool, and receiving messages straight from God’s heart to ours.  Miss Amanda (Health/Wellness teacher) helped us start an experiment to show how powerful our words truly are.

We are learning about Fallacy (Debate).  Yesterday, we determined that learning opposing viewpoints are actually helpful, both for us to confirm our thoughts and maybe change our minds, and also for us to understand and help others.

Mr. Kevin and the Kindergarten can be heard singing songs, learning to strum the guitar, playing in their castles (they have TWO indoor play structures), reading stories, listening to records during rest time, and adventuring into the woods with Mr. Thor.

Passion projects this past week are slowly taking shape.  Despite the lack of internet (we’re working on it), we’ve had an epic tech take-apart, research done on digital design for Roblox, a Minecraft build of our actual school (to scale, based on student-made measurements), illustration of original comic books, construction of cat thrones and toys, an online school shop taking place, hand-sewing stuffed animals, creative writing, fort construction, student governance and (a favorite) frog and toad collection, terrarium setup and observation.

I thank you for honoring your children’s childhood.  This is a truly magical realm where they are discovering as much about themselves as they are about their classmates and the environment which they are in.

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