Blue Sky School

People often misunderstand me when I say how I work. They think that because I say I work well quietly, I mean completely isolated. That, however, couldn't be farther from the truth. I’m an ambivert, so I fall somewhere in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum. At the beginning of this exploration (A seven week period each focusing on a different topic) on cognition, we were instructed to take the 16 Personalities Test and write a conclusion about whether we thought the results were true or not. I got Campaigner- ENFP-T. After doing some research on my result, I found out that Campaigners have extroverted thought and intuition, but introverted feeling and sensing. This puts me in the middle of the spectrum. I often say that I work best quietly, but that does not mean in a quiet environment. I actually like working in busier places, places where I get lost in the noise and crowd. My ideal learning and working environment is also heavily impacted when I’m far away fro...

How does my brain work? My brain is like a business building or like a university or like a control centre so there's a bunch of rooms and they all control different parts of my body and my brain. For example, there is movement, memories, my internal thoughts, how I act, etc and in all those rooms instead of people in a university, it's all my emotions and personalities. For example, there is focus, stress and fear, creativity, etc. All of the emotions/personalities have jobs to do within a day and sometimes they are called to go off schedule because as I've learned, not everything goes according to plan. For example, if my teacher says, “Hey Tim, you have new assignment,” so then the schedule changes. In the memory section of my brain, there is one room called reminders. This is where all the ideas that I have go when I forget them. Some memories or ideas will temporarily leave but they always come back. I like to think of my memories or ideas as balloons because ju...

Two weeks ago, I was in the midst of my daily YouTube rabbit hole, watching video after video, until I discovered a man by the name of Feliks Zemdegs. He solved the famous Rubik’s Cube in a mere four seconds. The exact time being 4.22 seconds. My mind was blown. Feeling inspired, I immediately ran to my mom’s room and convinced her to buy me a Rubik’s Cube. She was not impressed. However, because her love for me is so strong, she agreed to pick one up, thinking this may be just another one of my phases that do not last more than a couple of days. I wanted to prove her wrong. However, I forgot one small detail. Solving a Rubik’s Cube with no experience is hard. Very, very hard. The first step in the beginner method was solving the white side, specifically, the cross. This alone took me thirty minutes. At this point, I was feeling hopeless. So I took to the internet. The hardest part surprisingly wasn’t solving the cube but was finding a tutorial that explain...

What is learning? That’s a hard question to answer. Learning is a lot of different things, to a lot of different people. Some say learning is knowledge that is acquired through experience, or it’s memorizing something, or maybe it’s just changing and growing. There’s not really a right or wrong answer, just opinions. There are scientific opinions and there are philosophical opinions. To me, there are different kinds of learning. Like, babies learning how to breathe. That’s not something you’re taught, or something you can figure out based on memory. So what is that then? To me, that’s natural learning. It’s instinctual. Then there’s things like learning to walk. Picture this, a little kid tries to walk and falls. The child does this over and over. But then, they figure out that they can lean on a table or something to stay up. To me, things like that is learning from experience.   One strong example I can think of learning is when I learned to ride a bicycle. I...

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...

We have all had experiences where working with others did not go so well and we could not understand someone else’s point of view. I get it, it would be much easier working with someone who is similar to you and you would just agree with everything, but the truth is, the beautiful thing about working in a group is having the end product not just being one idea, but all ideas. A force bigger than one is powerful, no matter what the end product looks like. In my opinion, it is worth it if in the end your group feels proud of what you have accomplished together. This does not deny that it is still hard working with others who are different from you, it just proves that working with someone who is different is essential. I have learned this through my learning journey at my school, Blue Sky. There, we were taught for one whole week on how to work with someone who is different from you. In this blog, I will be answering this question through my experiences in this learning journey. I...

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...

Group work has always been a challenging hole to fill in the traditional school system with all the unique diverse ideas and reasonable participation in every student, trying the activity before deciding not or to participate. Today several kids at traditional schools are highly struggling with the outdated curriculum on social skills and  building healthy relationships. Thoughout this blog post I would like to break down some main factors that I believe help others when working in a group that is diverse. Assumption of “ Special Needs Or Disabilities” At my former school I  witnessed a lot of discrimination of neurological needs and disabilities in group work,  I know this has been happening because I have been one of those people. I was diagnosed with Autism when I was only 3 years old and ever since then it has been challenging to tell my peers about my “ Special Needs” because they sometimes didn’t understand me or made assumptions about how I learn bas...

For me to learn I need a quiet space, if I don’t have a quiet space I will be chating with the other learners in the school,  If I do that I will be screwing up everyone's learning and that’s just not good. At my other schools I would talk to everyone and be distracting and get sent to the office a lot, so at Blue Sky School I wanted a new start I’m trying my best to not chat with the other learners when they are working. When someone is usually trying to teach me something I won’t get it because of my dyslexia. Working is something I have trouble with but if I'm working with my hands I can accomplish a ton of things. Last year I built a table with a guy (Phil Wood) I met at a workshop called Functional Reclaimed. It took a bit of time with all of the stages of building. Some of the steps were shopping to get the materials, planning the design, cutting the wood, fitting the wood, building the base, getting the glass,  and fitting the glass. It took me about 4 and a half m...

My skill is my brain. The brain is working on my writing thoughts down and working draft. The next thought I am working on group workshops my brain keeps it for doing mindfulness which it gives me. It has been a week giving more focused on department on my skills that I do. I worked with pressure with my skills activities and mindfulness it has a great day to do my department of my numery. It has a great attention on focusing on my work and a great tech use at school. When I use tech it’s for working stuffs and not during lunch. My brain has energy for working at brain boost break. The next thing that I do is giving me more work that I do is working on my topic skills it has a great work that I do in my whole life I really like is working more skills. I do my brainstorm work on my skills that works for me. I love doing hard work on my skill writing. I do IXL work on my math work that I do on grade 1 to grade 12 which is C stands for Calculus. I do typing games on my lesson with lett...

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 ...

My Learning Brain   Over the past few weeks I had the opportunity to explore how I learn through this exploration which was Cognition. An exploration is a “subject” that we spend  couple months focusing on. Reflecting on how I learn, I there are  certain circumstances under which I learn best. I learn best independently with no distractions or sounds. I also learn best when I am organized, energized, actively engaged or taking notes.  Finally, I learn best in small groups.  There are a lot of ways that I learn best, but these are the ones I feel are most important. One of the things that we experimented with throughout this exploration was not listening to music during independent work time. In the previous exploration I listened to music when I was practicing French on Duolingo and doing math on IXL. Music helps me focus because it blocks off all the other sounds. I remember when I was writing a blog and there was instrumental music in the backgr...

My Preferred Learning Environment For a safe learning environment, I need lots of exercise, a good relationship with coaches, and some friends. I also am a visual learner and use different visual tools to help me. I learn when I get lots of exercise. I get pent up energy. I like karate and brain boosts. When I’m in workshops with pent up energy, I look like this.. This is how I feel… I feel like running around the building hundreds of times. This is what I look like when I’m in a workshop with no pent up energy… This is what I feel like… I feel much better in workshops. For the first exploration, I did not take my own brain boosts when I needed to. (A brain boost is when you get your energy out and get your heart rate up.) That changed when I wrote a summary on how I learn. I sent that summary to the coaches and then they made a better learning environment for me. Here is the summary that I wrote. In between workshops, I used to go outside for a...

In grade 2, I started getting in trouble all the time because I didn’t really like school. I thought there were more fun things to do, so I did them. I got in trouble for that. The teacher was making the kids do normal school stuff like writing, math, French and reading. I would talk when I wasn’t supposed to or just play around at my desk instead of working. When someone would find me doing those things, they would send me to the hall. I would play hockey with a pencil and paper ball. That was better than being in the classroom. I would always stay outside longer than I was supposed at recess to and hide in my locker instead of going to class. Then, either my teacher or another teacher would see me. They would assume that I was just misbehaving. Really, I didn’t want to go into the class and do my work. I didn’t think I could do a good job at it. I felt bad about myself. They would say, “Go to the office.” I told myself I didn’t really care. Everyone started thinking I was ...

“Everyone learns in different ways on different days.” That is a phrase that goes around Blue Sky School. It speaks to the infinite amount of people's different learning styles and that not everyday will be catered to a learner’s preferred learning style.  It also shows that people learn at different paces. My learning needs to be organized or I can’t function but for someone else maybe their true learning happens when they get messy and are very hands-on, and that’s okay. At Blue Sky we do a survey in the morning called “How Do You Feel” to let our coaches (teachers) know what our mindset is in the moment and generally throughout the day. This addresses the  part of the phrase, "Everyone learns on different days." So if I am feeling really tired or worn out or maybe there is something hard going on in my life then the coaches will know that and may not push me as hard. But on the flip side if I say I am having a great day and I am ready to learn, the coaches wi...

Blue Sky School has ruined my daughter; she will not be able to go to a traditional high school. After just 90 days in the Blue Sky School setting, she is now too confident, too self-aware, too assertive, and too mature to sit in a regular high school classroom. She would annoy her high school teachers, respectfully questioning their statements and offering them thoughtful feedback on their teaching. She would frustrate the administration, firmly insisting that every single student has the right to self-regulate and get centering time and physical activity in between every single class. She would shut down the bullies and empower the quiet students. She would be a disruptor. A changemaker. An advocate. --- We took a chance on Blue Sky School because we were concerned a traditional high school experience would harm our daughter. She is smart and talented, but also sensitive, moral and inquisitive. I often describe my daug...