How are we improving?
A healthy school climate is balanced upon four pillars: teaching/learning, relationships, environment and safety. We are grateful to the founding families of the Verdi EcoSchool for sharing their thoughts, feedback and unflinching perspective of what an effective school environment should be. We have taken their vision to heart as we continue to grow and evolve into an educational program that honors each student as an individual and cultivates respect and awareness for our unique place.
Teaching/Learning
Balancing the hands-on, place based education philosophy with dedicated classroom time proved to be a challenge in our first semester. Students loved the time outdoors, immersed in project based learning but felt disconnected from the meaning of the experience. Why were these experiences important? How did they connect to classroom concepts and core standards? The students worried that they weren't learning enough or learning effectively. Our education team has designed a curriculum that gives students a chance explore core academic subjects using approaches like guided math, project based learning and experiential learning. Students work in multi age groups on a real life/project based experiences, exercise the newly learned skills through games and centers and then practice honing their concept mastery through classroom problem solving work.
Test Kitchen Math
The Test Kitchen Math course is divided into ability-based small groups. Students rotate daily between direct instruction and a hands-on cooking station to develop a strong foundation in the basic mathematical operations of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Advanced students progress through operations and algebraic thinking, number and operations in base ten, fractions, measurement and data, geometry, and statistics.While cooking, students experience the real-life applications of mathematics through the concepts of units of measure, proportion, budgeting, conversions and more. Their Test Kitchen Lab Reports provide documentation of their learning and growth.
Thursday Agricultural Science
