Journey: Session 4, Week 6

The last week of the session is over! Learners finished up their quest, genre, and other badges and compiled them! It was packed with stress, fun, and learning! Here are the details:

#1 - One of our best exhibitions yet? A showcase of excellent work! I am sure you all already know, but for those who don’t, an exhibition is a session event showcasing the learners' work to parents and guests. The best part… The learners lead and create it all! In this session, Journey and Launchpad combined for an exhibition, diagnosed patients, showed their Quest displays and announced a winner for the podcast competition. The winner was… Tommy!!!

#2 - Core skills with your house? A school-wide bonding experience! Houses are a new feature to Acton, having been added this year. There are five Houses, each with a different color and room, learners from each studio, and an assigned Launchpad leader! Starting this session every Wednesday, core skills time was spent at your house instead of your studio. Learners have loads of fun with this and can get help from each other!

#3 - Sharpening Our Social-Emotional Skills: Growth Through 360-Degree Feedback! At the end of every session, Journey has 360-degree feedback, a process focused on studio mates giving feedback to each other about how they did over the session. This feedback includes ratings from 1-10 on intentionality (working hard and staying focused), civility (being kind and respectful), excellence (delivering excellent work and helping to make sure others do too), and leadership (taking on roles in the studio and balanced being warm-hearted and tough-minded), it includes an overall warm and cool feedback.

#4 - Badge compiling! The craziest part of the session! Journey must compile their badges in the last week of every session. This simply means putting most of their quest/genre/civ challenges on one document, organizing it, making a table of contents, and writing a reflection. This is usually very chaotic, as people have to work at home and work to get their badges approved by fellow learners and audited by a guide.

After the week of break, it will be session 5! It will include a Chemistry and Cooking quest, a Review of restaurants by genre, and the Acton Business Fair. We can’t wait to tell you all about it!