Monday and Tuesday before our Fall Break were "Choice Days." The goal was to "take the lead with learning."
Morning and afternoon students could pick a "passion project" or a topic of interest and dive in!
So, we had a really excellent time learning about our "passion."
Lannie wants to get into the music production business. For "Choice Days" she explored a powerful online mixer called "Audiotool." It has special effects, synths, drums, and a lot of other features. Some were hard to figure out, but it was really fun. She started to create beats that she can use in her Exit Presentation at the end of her year.
Sheldon plans to graduate in January. So, he used the time to work on his Exit Presentation slides. Students in Learning 4Life Success earn only a C if they do the same level of work on their Exit Presentation as everyone else. But, most of us want to get an A! So we do extra. We add more photos. We select background music. We practice our introductions so we can say them smoothly. We practice "Stand and deliver" all year long so we know how to do an oral presentation just like we will need to do in college or the workplace.
Sheldon worked really hard finding music and photos to upgrade his basic presentation. It will be excellent!
Tre is preparing for college. He will be studying to become a paleontologist. So, he spent his Choice Days digging deeper into what it will take to follow the path to his dream job! He is creating a spreadsheet comparing all the colleges he is looking at. He is also exploring several college paleontology websites and is deciding what reading he needs to do before college starts next fall. Tre's passion has been strong for years. Now, it is finally time to start to make his dream come true!
Itancan started writing a book during his Choice Days. The title is "A Mysterious Portal." He began to develop the setting and characters for a fiction novella he is writing. (A novella is like a short novel.) He is using his creative thinking and writing skills to make his draft. At the end of each day's learning, everyone had to do a "Stand and Deliver" oral presentation to tell the class what they'd done. On Tuesday, we also showed our work to our classmates and teacher. We had to explain what we'd created. Sister Patrice made a video of some of us so we could see how much better we are with Stand and Deliver.
One really funny thing that happened was that Sister Patrice didn't know how to use the iPad video so she accidently made the videos be in fast motion! We all had a chance to laugh at that! In fast-motion, our presentations are very, very short!
Doing oral presentations can be kind of scary. But we are getting better with practice. We liked being able to tell about our passion project from Choice Days! Maybe we can do this again!
