Blue Sky School

Top Ten Best Moments - Part 2 “Grace and Will at the conference” https://tedxottawa.ca/speakers-2019/ Intro The Power of a Dime - Frank O’Dea (Will) The first speaker to take the stage was co-founder of Second Cup and Officer of the Order of Canada Frank O’Dea. He started off his speech by talking about his youth and how he used to be homeless in Toronto. He said that it was a rough and sometimes violent existence. He shared about his drinking problems when he was homeless, saying that he would panhandle with his buddies trying to get enough for a bottle of wine and talking about what they would do tomorrow, “Tomorrow I’ll get a job, Tomorrow I’ll quit drinking, Tomorrow I’ll call my family” then having to choose whether or not to sleep inside or out. He finally realized that he had two choices, “Die or change.” That’s when he thought about an ad he heard in a shop that was about alcoholism that kept repeating a phone number. He went to the nearest payphone a...

Top Ten Best Moments(Part 1) “Grace and Will at the thing” https://tedxottawa.ca/speakers-2019/ Intro I think I can speak for both Grace and I when I say that we had an amazing time at TEDx Ottawa. But before we get into that we should talk about how we were invited. We were invited because of our participation in a program at our school called Eloquent Ottawa which was created by the, you guessed it Canadian Institute of Mass Communications(Or CIMC). The CIMC just so happened to be a sponsor of TEDx Ottawa. With that out of the way time for the story of getting there. After school on the big day we jumped into Karen’s car and went straight to Pita Pit  to fuel up. Then we hit the open road and drove to the Tunney’s Pasture LRT station. We rode to Rideau and then set off on an adventure to find the NAC. We walked in the direction we thought it was for a few minutes until we were on some bridge. That’s when we admitted that we had no idea where it was. So we broke out...

On Monday, September 30 th B ran a workshop on community ecology. In this workshop we talked about the arctic ecosystem, how all the animals form a community, their roles in that community and how they interact with one another. We started the workshop with an art activity where we have to make organisms out of clay and pipe cleaners. We then discussed the relationships between these organisms. “I was impressed by both the artistic representation of the organisms and learner’s awareness of the various relationships in an ecosystem.” - B

Payday for Thomas On Monday of this week , Deagan ran a workshop on universal basic income. At the start of this workshop we were handed professions with salaries that were either fixed or variable. These jobs would pay different amounts depending on the job, and if it was variable your pay was dependant on the roll of a die. In this workshop the people with fixed income did quite well, whilst the people with variable income struggled and scraped by because of social services. That was the first round of the game. After we debriefed that we moved onto the second round where each person could receive income from the government no questions asked, no paperwork and no strings attached. This helped everyone but it helped the people who were struggling so much in the first round most of all. They got to live life and not have to look on in envy as everyone else bought lavish items but buy them for themselves. “I found that the learners were instantly grasping onto the learning ou...

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 the heck is learning anyways? Well, that is a hard question to answer with no one clear answer but I’ll take a stab at it. I think that learning means something different to everyone. I believe the reason behind this is that everyone has had different experiences with learning and being taught different skills, so I think these are contributors to people’s interpretations of learning. I also know that people learn in different ways on different days. I know learning is this way because of several reasons. The first reason I know this is because of my experiences with learning. My experiences with learning prove this because when I’m in school, specifically science and math classes the teacher would be explaining something to us and I would be fine with just hearing the concepts to understand them but other days I would need a visual representation and/or a real world example to fully understand something. The second reason is that Blue Sky they trie...