What does it mean?
What has this year meant to you? What has this past year at Acton meant to your child? If you are continuing on your hero’s journey with us next year or if you aren’t how will your Acton experience be part of your life journey? What were your highlights, your challenges? Are you different today than on the first few days of the school year? How, in what ways are you different?
Sometimes, it can be scary to reflect. Did I accomplish all that I hoped? Maybe not, maybe so, but hopefully you were able to gain along the way. Give yourself a moment right now as an Acton parent and ask yourself some of these questions or perhaps others. Give yourself the space to reflect and hopefully honor the hard work you put in, the hard work of your child, and the hard work of our collective community as we embarked on this journey of the year together. Today we celebrate a milestone, the end of Session 7 but more importantly the end of our school year. During this beautifully, new, hard, but wondrous year we have found a minimum of 5 nuggets of shared treasure. 1. Our children had the opportunity to attend school in person amidst a global pandemic 2. All learners officially can read (we had 0 readers in September) 3. All learners can set goals, strategize, and hold themselves and others accountable for meeting goals. 4. All learners have developed deep friendships 5. All learners have developed a deep love for learning and love to explore and discover.
At Acton we know that questions are the super power of humans! Questions lead to more questions and just the other day our Guide demonstrated the value of questioning. She asked “What came first the chicken or the egg?” Learners scratched their heads and suddenly this one question sparked a deep debate about parents, creation, the universe, stars, humanity, and more. All year one question has guided each Session Quest and has guided our conversations and launch learning throughout the year, the question of “What does it mean to be human?” This is a question with many answers and learners have been asking one another, referring to it as the BIG question. So far they’ve shared “Being human means caring for others and our Earth, it means loving people, it means to care for animals, it means you get to learn and be responsible, it means you are kind and cheer people up, it means we get to have fun, it means you grow and grow our planet, it means you get to make friends, it means you get to play and you get to be BRAVE!”
It’s important to honor the ever bountiful journey of amazing that we’ve experienced together and how amazing our young learners truly are. Thank you for being BRAVE this year. Thank you for sharing your learner with us and for walking with us. Our journey ahead brings more beautiful questions, challenges, and opportunities for celebration.