Summer Enrichment

Here are a few ways to include some enrichment over our short summer break. Students can participate in fun learning experiences without feeling pushed to the point of burnout!

Reading -

Independent reading books should be chosen at an instructional level (challenge zone) for your child (they can read AND understand MOST but not all of the content). Books that are just a little higher than their level, at a frustrational level (panic zone), are perfect for you to read TO them or with them. Finally, books that are a bit too easy (comfort zone) are great for your child to read to someone else (perhaps a younger sibling)... All three types of reading (independent, read aloud, and read to) are important to developing and improving literacy. Set family goals for daily or weekly reading time. Work with your child to improve their reading stamina!

Looking for reading material to take on vacation or read at home? The Texas Library Association has wonderful reading lists based on age/reading level.

2x2 List: Appropriate for ages 2 - 6 (link includes books and accompanying activities)

Bluebonnet List: Level 3 - 5 (this site also has TONS of accompanying resources including discussion questions you can ask your child to check for comprehension)

Lone Star List: Level 6-8 As always, especially with middle school content, use your parental discretion when helping your Eagle choose appropriate reading content.

www.arbookfind.com can help you search the exact reading level of books. (For example, BL: 5.4 indicates a book is at the level of the 4th month of 5th grade)

Writing - Keep a journal, or better yet, continue the blogs we started this session so that students can share what they are doing, thinking, feeling with each other while they are away! This is a highly engaging, social way to get our 21st century learners writing. Our blogs our private to our school only (students have a password they can share with family members or friends if they would like to)

STEM hands-on: Here is a blog by Girlstart, an Austin company that gets girls involved and interested in STEM subjects (science, tech, engineering, and math). Their hands-on activities would be fun for your family to do together at home this summer (and not just for girls!!)

Camp Recommendations:

Summer Spark - Started by an Acton Guide

https://www.summerspark.com

Moolahu

http://www.moolahu.com/camps/

Travel...relax...and enjoy quality time with your family! Can't wait to see the Eagles back in September!

Digital Citizenship and Multimedia Project Quest ~ Session 6

During our last quest of the school year, we are sending our Eagles off with very important digital citizenship skills. We will be having discussions and simulations about how to handle many situations they may encounter online. These include internet safety topics such as cyberbullying, how to protect private information, and cultivating a positive digital footprint.

 Students will also be applying their new digital skills with a variety of multimedia projects including creating their own blogs, podcasts, and digital stories. There are many benefits and reasons to blog at school! Here are a few of them...

 

The Eagles have already shown a lot of enthusiasm about this quest! We are excited to see what they create, and can't believe we've made it to the final session already! 

We are getting our digital citizenship resources from commonsensemedia.org.  The blogs are safe and secure and made specifically for education on edublogs.org. 

Catherine & Sara ~ Acton Academy West Guides

Butterfly Transformation Project with Zoey *Session 5 & 6

Zoey Upshaw is Art Guide at Acton Academy. She guides students through creative processes so they learn the fundamentals of fine art and the skills for loving and living life. With lots of positive energy and instruction, students learn to paint, draw, sculpt, print and create masterpieces.

In the art studio Zoey encourages students to let their imaginations take them on visual journeys that lead to transformation and innovation. She is constantly looking for new creative ways to engage students and inspire artistic expression.

Zoey says her Heroes are masters of the Arts - Michelangelo, O’keeffe and Einstein, at least for today.  

BUTTERFLY TRANSFORMATION PROJECT

Some of the best teachers come from nature. Butterflies are going to inspire us to learn many lessons. We will create with acrylic paint giant butterflies. We will study metamorphosys, symmetry, creativity. Students will develop their drawing skills and learn the fundamentals of acrylic painting. This assignment guides us into an appreciation of beauty and gives us an opportunity to recreate that beauty in a masterpiece. Students will make creative decisions, mix colors, hold the brush properly and see line, color, value, texture, shape, form and space that need to be drawn and painted to the best of their ability.

LIFE LESSON

The butterfly represents rebirth, revival, rejuvenation and transformation. We are all morphing, learning and evolving, Each of us have stories of how we experience change. Never stop the process of moving through the stages of the butterfly in your own life.

Learn more about Zoey's experience here:

www.austincreativeartcenter.org 

Survival Quest - *Session 5

Welcome to Session 5! During this session, we will begin a Survival Quest. In weeks 1 and 2, we will begin by exploring organisms basic needs, animal and plant adaptations, and discovering what it takes to survive in a competitive world.

Next, during weeks 3 and 4 we will dive into ecosystems and how all organisms are interrelated and dependent.

Finally, we will experience various plant and animal life cycles with a hands on look at the life cycle of butterflies here in the studio. The culminating challenge will be for the level 3-5 students to apply their new knowledge to determine what it would take to survive in an outer space environment.

The level 1 and 2 students will research a certain animal and write a grant style proposal for the resources and environment it would require to raise it as a pet. We look forward to sharing our new vocabulary, interactive scientific notebooks, and final presentations with all of you!

Catherine & Sara ~ Acton West Guides

Poets and Playwrights Quest ~ Zach Scott Theatre Field trips! ~ Session 4

We hope everyone had a nice week off with your families. We were so impressed with the resilience the students showed during our Circuits Quest. The Arduino projects (a new one each week) that involved building complicated circuits and writing many lines of code were extra challenging. To our surprise, many students stepped up as leaders of their teams, and all of the students became invested in encouraging and assisting their group to complete each task. It was amazing to see the excitement on their faces when their hard work and perseverance paid off, and they had a working product.

JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH

This session, we will be making a shift to highlight and cultivate a new set of talents in a Poets and Playwrights Quest. Over the next several weeks, we will be reading extraordinary models of, writing, and performing our own poetry and plays. We will even be making two field trips to Zach Scott Theater this session to see a production of James and the Giant Peach with a student from the main Acton campus as James.  The next one we will see is Alice in Wonderland, starring our very own Acton West Eagle,Trinity, as Alice!  In addition, we plan to use some of our Civilization time this session to have some timely (politically unbiased!) discussions about the Presidential election process in our country. 

Catherine & Sara ~ Acton West Guides

Circuits and Austin Tinkering School field trip! ~Session 3 *week 1

We are back!  Hopefully you all had a wonderful holiday break.

This session we will start introducing the Eagles to the world of electronics.  We believe that this is a basic building block understanding the world that we live in today.  It will be useful for each of the Eagles to be exposed to this subject if they want to be anything from a pioneer in robotics to simply wiring up the holiday lights at home.  Maybe you can have them do it next year :).

We will start with the fundamentals by introducing how electrons flow through a circuit.  Not only will we have the Eagles build basic circuits (with batteries, LEDs, resistors, etc), but we are going to have them stand in a circle and each of them will participate as a part of a circuit where they are going to push (battery), hand over (conductor), slow down (resistor), stop (insulator), or use (LED) electrons.  This will be a nice team building exercise after the holiday break and it will give them a great physical representation of how circuits work.

During this quest they will also be taking a field trip to the Austin Tinkering School where the lessons of the first week will be reinforced outside of our studio.

In the following weeks, they will:

1) Learn more complex circuits by completing challenges (working with sensors, potentiometers, etc.)

2) Be introduced to programming a microcontroller (Arduino Uno) to control sensors and LEDs.

3) Learn the process of using what they have learned to come up with a design, and execute on that design.

Happy New Year!

The Acton West Team

THE HUMAN CIRCUIT GAME!

Writer's Workshop & Genius Hour ~ Session 2 *weeks 6-8

We hope everyone had a wonderful week together during Thanksgiving. For these three school weeks remaining before our holiday break, level 2-5 students will be wrapping up their first writer's workshop of the year. This workshop focused on informational writing. So far, students have worked through prewriting and drafting. Next week, they will revise and edit. The final informational essays will be published for your viewing during the exhibition next Friday! 

For these next three weeks, we are also implementing something called Genius Hour during afternoon project time. In lieu of a full length quest, students have the opportunity to pursue a project that they are passionate about. The only requirements are that they come up with a "driving question" that cannot easily be answered with a simple online search and that they come up with a product to show off what they have learned. Here is a video on the origins of Genius Hour.

Acton Academy West Guides ~ Catherine and Sara

Entrepreneurship Quest *Session 2- week 2

This week, your Eagles are beginning a four week quest to equip the Eagles with skills, tools, and frameworks relevant to entrepreneurship (e-ship). Students have been placed on a "company" team to work with for the remainder of this quest. Each week, the teams will engage in a series of mini challenges to apply the principles of e-ship.  The focus of mini challenges  this week will be company formation, including, assigning jobs, holding Socratic discussions about their decision making process, naming the company, and starting to build up funding.  At the end of the session, the Eagles will show proof of what they have learned in a final "standoff" during which each of the six companies will set up a beverage stand and compete for profits.  We can't wait to see what these budding entrepreneurs come up with!

Catherine & Sara ~ Acton Academy West Guides

COMPANY MEETING

MAKING THEIR DUCT TAPE WALLETS TO COLLET PROFITS!

Science projects & iFLY field trip *Session 2-week 1

On Friday, we will take a trip to iFLY. During project time this week, the students will participate in labs and simulations to provide them with the background knowledge needed to get the most out of their iFLY experience.

At school this week, we will be exploring the differences between solids and fluids and the effects that gravity, air drag, and frontal area have on objects. At iFLY students will be led in a physics demonstration in the wind tunnel as well as an interactive investigation about how parachute parameters affect fight performance. 

Catherine & Sara ~ Acton West Guides

The British Colony of Acton *week 6

This week, your heroes have traveled back in time to the year 1776. Acton Academy West has become the British colony of Acton. All week, students will immerse themselves in colonial times. Each student will be assigned the role of a well known patriot or loyalist to play this week. The guides will act as royal governors in this simulation, imposing taxes and other royal "proclamations" that the heroes will have to follow. 

Talk to your students about which side of the debate they are on and the struggles involved with each one. This simulation will culminate with the students debating their position (in character) whether to revolt against King George or not. They will explore the pros and cons of rebellion and use the persuasive powers they have been working on this session to sway their fellow colonists. 

We are looking forward to a lot of colonial style fun this week with your kids followed by a much deserved fall break! Have a great one!

Catherine & Sara ~ Acton West Guides

Power of Persuasion *Week 3-5

Last week we started our first official quest, "Power and Persuasion". The objective of this three week quest is for students to discover that they have the power to change the world. Last week, students focused on discovering some of their own physical, mental, and emotional powers through a series of group challenges. This week, they will take a look at what gives others their powers through watching famous speeches, exchanging hero "trading cards with their classmates", and interviewing one of their personal heroes. The culminating mission in week three will be for them use the powers they have discovered to write their own persuasive speech on a topic they care about.

Catherine & Sara ~ Acton West Guides

Team Building Challenge - Lip Dub ~Session one * week 1-2

The lip dub video is a beginning of the year challenge to get all of the students involved and working together. The students planned out the video entirely themselves from start to finish. Besides getting to know their new school mates while working to accomplish a common goal, some of the concepts covered through this project include:

• working on a team (each team planned a section of the video)

• working across teams (each team had to communicate with each other to ensure the video would flow from one part to the next)

• critiquing exemplar work (students watched examples from other Acton locations and other schools to identify strengths and weaknesses) 

• creating a rubric (students created criteria for their own rubric based on the strengths they identified in model videos)

• self-evaluation/reflection (students will evaluate and reflect on their final product using the rubric they created)

• Building self confidence: (First hand experience building something from the ground up that is completely student led. This helps them understand their potential here at Acton and what they can accomplish on their own, without teachers, this is an important lesson when adapting to this new learning environment.)

Watching the joy on these kids faces as they review their takes has been a privilege -we've seen character traits come out that we didn't anticipated during this challenge, some of the more reserved kids taking leadership roles and blossoming with pride and confidence, others over coming their fears to be there for their teams- all expressing their unique creativity-we know you all will be so proud, impressed and inspired, as much as we have been after seeing the final cut!

Catherine & Sara ~ Acton West Guides