Blue Sky School

Choir! Choir! Choir! was started by Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman (aka DaBu) in 2011 as a weekly drop-in singing event. Their project is about bringing people together through singing, comedy, and community building! The night includes it all! When you arrive you get a lyric sheet at the door, DaBu will lead you through learning about the vocal arrangement, and a video is recorded. Everyone learns the songs together and has so much fun while at it!  On Sunday, February 16, 2020 Choir! Choir! Choir! is coming to the National Arts Center (the NAC) for an event at 8:00pm. Tickets start at $15.00 and go up to $40.00 depending on where you want to sit.  If anyone is interested in going to sing, please email me ( jaden@blueskyschool.ca ) so I can coordinate for everyone to sit together! (this is not an official Blue Sky event, but I thought other learners might be interested)  “I’m so excited to go because nothing nurtures the soul like singing” Brianne B...

On September 26th for Culinary Science (this is something we do every Thursday and Friday to learn about the science of food and to develop the skills to cook for ourselves), we learned about salt! The Cooking group made extremely good vegan and gluten-free scalloped potatoes , which we ate for community lunch (once a week we all gather together to eat a meal that a group has prepared for us.) The Science group looked at salt through microscopes and learned about salt molecules, the Science group also made ice-cream and learned about how salt lowers the freezing point of the water. “It was so fun AND informative!” - Grace Hill announces about the science workshop. 

At Blue Sky School instead of classes we have two “houses” that meet once a day for an hour. We discuss what’s coming up in the week, we play games, we practice the arts, we build teamwork skills, and much more! Everyone is part of a house and has a say in what we do. These past few weeks one of the main things we’ve talked about is what we wanted to name our houses. Itsarrr goto tdu eeed and RatAttackz are the names we decided on, Itsarrr goto tdu eeed was decided by playing a game with Scrabble pieces and RatAttackz was decided because Rat is Art mixed up and the RatA ttackz house does art every meeting. One of our learners gave their opinion on house meetings and this is what she said, “House meetings are fun and I like it when we talk about deep stuff because you get close to your house-mates!” - Bella    Also once a week on Thursday we have a full house meeting where we come up with new rules as a community.

Responsibilities by Mikey At Red Pine Camp, we each contributed at meal times. Some learners set tables and some cleaned the dishes. At RPC, washing the dishes is called slopping. The “sloppers” wear rain boots and aprons because you can get wet. The staff really appreciated our help in the kitchen.  Red Pine Waterfront by Julia Something that is always a highlight  when we go to Red Pine Camp is the amazing waterfront and beautiful Golden Lake. In the beginning we were all worried that it was going to be rainy and the water was going to be cold. Boy, were we wrong! When we got there the weather was sunny and a crisp 19 degrees. The first afternoon we were there we had independent choice time, practically everyone wanted to go swimming, boating or just hang out by the water.  We made our way down to the waterfront and immediately jumped into the water! It was very refreshing and crisp (in other words really really cold). After a few jumps in and out, the...

What is your brain? How does it learn? Last year I was really interested in different types of brains and how they learn so I came up with a theory for 6 different types of brains and I made a quiz to see how different people’s brains learn (this is the quiz .) Then, this year we started learning more about how the brain works and what happens when you learn. My knowledge has come a long way in understanding the brain and I have learned about neurons, neuroplasticity, the limbic system, the prefrontal cortex, and the brain stem. The brain is split into four different “lobes”: the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobe. Each lobe is associated with something different. The frontal lobe is associated with executive functions (self-control, planning, and reasoning.) The occipital lobe controls vision. The human brain contains around 100 billion neurons (brain cells.) A neurons job is to pick up stimuli (something that can trigger a reaction such ...