Freshmen Keystone Journey

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A huge component of the school’s experience is their outdoor endeavors, showcase nights, and their outreach to serve in their community. Within the school year, students take a week-long break called intensives. In which students explore and experience different activities outside the classroom. Many students go on trips to raft, rock climb, do community service, build and design product. They also do other fun things like a class on the novel, Harry Potter. Significant trips to the students are the Freshmen Keystone and Senior Expedition trip. On the senior trip, students share time together and brainstorm ideas to explore a career, an answer a real-world question or problem, or explore a subject of their choice. This is also a time …show more content…

Where students are challenged to give up their cell phones, in order to experience a time for bonding and learning about natural science, of the woodland space they share. All of this is done for them within the first month of the school year. They call this the induction period. Where the school’s senior leadership team, called “Rudder,” introduce Freshmen team to the school. The rudder is composed of a small group of seniors who are dedicated to further taking leadership in the school and community. They take part in volunteering in many school events and modeling leadership amongst the student body. In the induction period, Rudder facilitated icebreakers and team building games to the students. Therefore, through the games and challenges Rudder presents to the students, they develop a deeper interpretation of the importance of these activities in our everyday life and a small taste of our teaching approach. This also helps students breakout previous eight grade habits and open their eyes to the new high school atmosphere they got accepted …show more content…

They are introduced to the school values and the “Crew,” community they are part of. With the help of Rudder, teachers receive a discreet observation of students. In which they can take notes of the students who will be more outspoken in the classroom, quiet, challenging, and who the individual student coming into the learning environment. The freshmen team are presented with the school values, such as our, “Body Basics” and William Smith’s, “Habits of Excellence.” The body basics are, facing the person, eye contact, tone of voice, facial expression, and body posture. We introduce this to the students, to show how important their body language communicates to the people outside themselves. We do this through acting out scenes, which also provides students a tiny introduction to the work they will be doing in their Improv class. Which is a required class for the students to take because through improv and theater exploration, students become aware of their surroundings and become more present in their everyday life. The habits of excellence are self and community awareness, engagement in thinking and learning, responsibility, and time management. These are all habits the school wants to embed into student to work upon in the classroom and in their everyday life. Through reflection, students share where the habits take a role in their student

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