Blue Sky School

Hi. I’m Bella, I’m 14 years old, and I go to Blue Sky School. But let’s back-track a bit. I was homeschooled until I was 12, then I went to public school for grade 7, and ended up pulling out within the first semester. This was in 2017. Then I went back to being homeschooled up until October 2018, when I found Blue Sky, and I’ve been here ever since. But now that schools around the world are closed or closing due to COVID-19, I’ve been doing online school. It’s kind of full-circle. Anyway, this is what an average online school day looks like for me. My hours:  On an average week, I do school through Google Meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10am to 3:40pm. During these days I do what we normally do in person, because we’ve tried to translate as much of our in-person program to online. We have morning house meetings, independent work time (when we work on our goals or missions), lunch, numeracy, literacy and end-of-day house meeting. This is a pretty normal Blue Sk...

I have been at Blue Sky School for a little over a year, and it has recently come to my attention that the core skills of Tae Kwon-Do and Blue Sky overlap in many ways. In Tae Kwon-Do, there are the five values, or as we call them, Tenets. The Tenets of Tae Kwon-Do are; Courtesy, Integrity, Perseverance, Self-Control, Indomitable Spirit At Blue Sky School, we also have values, or Ideals. We believe that the ultimate Learner will show all of these. The ideals of Blue Sky School are; Kindness, Curiosity, Responsibility  At first, you might not think that these overlap, but once we get into dissecting them, they all work together to create the best learner there can be. First, let’s tackle Courtesy . This one was the easiest to dissect for me. First of all, it’s a direct synonym for Kindness, as seen on Thesaurus.com. Courtesy and Kindness can also be shown in very similar ways. In Tae Kwon-Do, courtesy is shown by saying ‘Yes Sir/Ma’am’, and standing straight with hand...

Coffee House! Now, contrary to what you might be thinking, we don’t go to a Coffee House every week, we have an event every Friday, called Coffee House. It’s a place for learners and coaches alike, to perform, tell stories, or even solve Rubic’s Cubes! One of the legendary traditions of Coffee House are learner Will’s stories. Here’s Will’s response to the question, ‘How would you describe your performances at Coffee House?’ “In a word, Zany.”   In all seriousness, Coffee House helps us collaborate in unique ways with performance. Lots of learners look forward to Coffee House all week (including myself)!  Léo’s performance with help from Will, Jaden and Harley.

On Friday, October 4th, Blue Sky School went to Camp Woolsey to clean up for winter. We helped out Modern Niagara with whatever we could on this day. We spread mulch along the edge of the parking lot, we filled the potholes with gravel, stocked the woodsheds, moved canoes, and raked the beach. It doesn't sound like much, but I can assure you, our joints liked us significantly less after this.  Mulching: The mulching took much longer than we thought it would, the group of learners had to rake, shovel, and wheel around big chunks of the stuff. At first they thought it was a little pile that they could finish in an hour, with just a few rakes, and boy oh boy were they wrong. The pile had been compressed by rain, and was so dense that the progress was slow. When we finally finished it was so rewarding! Graveling: “We started with a giant gravel pile and as we filled potholes the pile gradually shrunk and it was heartening to see that because it was representative of the work we ...

Goal posts! Now you’re probably wondering, what the heck are those? Let me explain.  As you may or may not know, each of the learners here at Blue Sky School have their own individual goals. They have all chosen these goals to work on during their free time, and we have had many systems to track these goals over our time in operation. But our newest way of tracking our goals are Goals Posts. Each goal post is different, and they are very customizable. We have already done around 3-4 iterations of them, each time adding something new. Today we added checking emails, and 20 minutes of numeracy every day.  As you can see from the photo below, each goal post is like a mini whiteboard with a permanent portion inside the whiteboard that allows us to check off our goals each day and then reuse it each week by simply erasing the dry erase. Will, a Blue Sky Learner says, “I think they’re very helpful to keep people on track while working and to be mindful of our goals” in reg...

Theme Park Design Sprint by Bella Day One Crazy 8s Crazy 8s is a quick way to come up with and plan ideas. “How does it work?”, you might ask. It works like this; first, you fold a piece of paper into eight sections. Then, set a timer for 40 seconds, and focus only on one section for the entire time. Repeat for all sections. Most of the learners have done Crazy 8s before, although the newer learners hadn’t, and it went surprisingly well. After we completed all the sections, we shared what we came up with. Day Two Disney stuff: On the second day of planning, we learned more about the Disney parks around the world to help inspire us. We learned about some of the behind the scenes, and secret things around the parks. Written plans: After we learned about the Disney stuff, we began to plan out our parks. We wrote, and drew ideas, and got our creative minds going! Feedback: After planning our parks, we taped them to the walls, and went around looking at everyone e...

Thoughts and emotions are like snowballs; if you don’t stop them from rolling down a hill, they get bigger. If you’re upset, but you don’t find the cause or solution, and leave it lingering instead, then it will keep getting bigger and bigger until it smacks you in the face, hard. However, if you stop the snowball, you can stop the negative emotion or thought. But snowballs aren’t all bad. Sometimes they can be good, like when you’re with a really good friend, and you tell an inside joke and you both start laughing. You’re bouncing off of each other’s energy and happiness, and you can’t stop laughing. That’s also the snowball effect.   It might be hard at first, but one way to control your thoughts and emotions is by trying to become more self-aware of them. To really try to identify why you’re feeling a certain way, and really be in the mindset of ‘Okay, so I’m feeling this way, why am I feeling like this?’ Once you’ve answered that, you can move on to asking yourself ‘What...