Happy New Year! Wishing all of you a great start to 2018!
A New Year is about renewed spirits and often, New Year resolutions. Usually, you would expect: go to the gym every day, eat organic vegan diet, or get that lucrative job or promotion. If you’ve made such New Year resolution before—Did it work? Well, the experience and research of motivation say otherwise.
So, how does a community of learners (like Acton Academy, whose curriculum is a series of Eagle’s driven SMART goals) set their New Year resolution? We start with small humble resolutions. Really simple ones, like: come on time, pack your bag, and make your bed. Clear goals, if cultivated into habits, will forge a character that leads to a destiny to find a calling and change the world.
Highlights:
- A New Year means a New Commitment (to Time)
- Survivor Quest: Call to Adventure
- Independence at home: Change the World (by Making your Bed)!
A New Year means a New Commitment to Time
We admit it. We have been relaxed towards the Malaysian timing for a while. Not the “I’m on my way” (while still at home) one-hour late, but the careless and unintentional five to ten minutes late. Our goal during the first year of Acton Academy Kuala Lumpur is building a community with a sense of belonging. Now that the relationships are forged, it’s Courage to Grow! So, we start the first day be posing this back to the Eagles: What are you going to do about this (being late)?
The Eagles voted to uphold standards. Circle Time for the Elementary School (ES) Eagles or Launches for the Middle School (MS) Eagles are sacred. The younger ES Eagles reflected: late-comers had been disrupting the studios. Is continued tolerance the right thing to do? Is being nice the right thing to do? Are we keeping our own promises?
Parents & readers, perhaps this article shed more light. After few discussion points, the Eagles agreed that latecomers have to sit outside the studios and remain in the car porch areas until the end of the Circle Time. This also applies to disruptive Eagles during Circle Time.
Since then, most Eagles came on time. Many also strived to ensure their parents stay conscientious to their morning routines. You might hear an Eagle said in the early mornings: “Mom, don’t get distracted browsing Facebook!”
Survivor Quest: Call to Adventure
A New Sprint also means a New Quest. Welcome to the long-awaited Survivor Quest, where Eagles build skills of wildlife survival, as well as learning about their identity. In week six, they will take their skills to the jungle: a camp!
The format of the Quest takes the predictable cycle of Cooking and Chemistry Quest, Learning to be and Learning to Know background knowledge first, followed by hands-on Learning to do practical activities. Almost all these skills are done using the best teacher for DIY knowledge: YouTube, so the Eagles also hone their skills of Learning to Learn. After that, it is followed by reflection, both individually via writing journals and as a group via sharing. Still not clear? I will explain it concretely later.
Each week, the Eagles focus on a few challenges. This week, they focused on food, knots, and fire.
The motivation is high as the Eagles looked forward to their exhibition goal—Camping! Every Eagle is super excited.
Food
The very first thing to survive? Find food!
How do you do it? You got to forage or hunt it. Gladly there are edible plants within ActonKL, thanks to the Community Garden Quests. Since there are no wild animals in the vicinity of ActonKL, the Eagles build traps to practice instead.
Eagles went on two forms of diet: foraging our garden for vegetables and get a taste of bugs. Yes, glorious bugs!
There was a lot of commotion. But here’s a lesson from our resident bug lover.
Knots & more
How do you connect two spars together, or make a knot to connect two different sizes string together?
Knots essentially is the solution to all these problems and an essential knowledge of creating tools in the forest. So how do we “teach” them? We don’t! Instead, we use a teacher that never gets tired of repeating: YouTube videos!
The Elementary School Eagles revisited their learnings further by doing journaling, while the Middle School Eagles took their learnings further. They learned how to use and maintain a machete and hand saw. Yes, that machete that many would think is too dangerous for a 12-year-old. The Eagles would need this skill to cut bamboo and build their campsite in five weeks time. Practice makes perfect. So, better start now!
Fire
The highlight of Week One of the Survivor Quest: Friday Fire activity!
As described earlier, the learning process involves particular learning cycles of Learning to be, Learning to learn, Learning to know and Learning to do. First, Eagles have to understand the Science of making fire using different methods. Followed by a simple safety test. Then, time to play with the most important invention in ancient human civilization—making fire.
Do you guys know how to start a bonfire?
Eagles made fire using different methods: flint and steel, via matches. Unfortunately, we had a rainy morning with hardly any sun. Perhaps fire via magnifying glass and friction by bow the next round!
Starting fire was NOT EASY. Nevertheless, being the first time for many young Eagles… there was a buzz of excitement and (good) chaos!
The MS Eagles had a Boss challenge: make fire and cook instant noodles! The winner gets to eat their instant noodle and also the second team’s noodle too!
The fire and cooking activity excitement spilled over to the ES Eagles too. They took up the challenge and cooked instant noodles, with vegetable additions directly from the garden!
Making fire proved to be seductive. Both studios ended up experimenting with different foods, cooking whatever they could find. The Guides got involved too. Circle and Launch time were missed. The promise of being on-time was replaced with the fire of learning! Like the moving flames, life can be unpredictable at Acton Academy 😛
Independence at home: Change the World (by Making your Bed)!
We’ve been pushing for Eagle’s independence in school for some time. Studio maintenance, community governance, goal setting, running meetings about their learning journey, and so on. But we could only do so much. We needed help and more courage to grow.
This Sprint, we called for the parents. Part of the Friday Fun challenge included Home Challenges. Eagles had to do house chores at home, such as packing their bags, packing their lunches and making their bed.
Eagles and parents rose up to the challenge.
I packed my bag last night and made my bed. How about you guys?”
Every morning, we would see pictures sent in by their parents. Imagine this is the morning greeting from every parent in the community’s chat group!
Soon, as Sir McRaven said it: Eagles will be changing the world.
Look forward to the enthusiasm. Soon, parents will be able to have their “take back the night”. Huh? What’s that? Like all good New Year resolutions, you got to keep persistent and stay tuned to find out :))
A great start to 2018 indeed.[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]