Vandermont

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With respect, honor, and gratitude, thank you, Veterans. 🇺🇸

Secondary studios’ collaborative Quest involves designing a three-panel escape wall for XSCAPE, a lobby experience for their customers. After much planning and puzzle-creating/problem-solving, they have prototypes, and their designs are coming along! There is still a lot of work to do, and this will be amazing to see in action when completed!

How about 4,5, and 6-year-olds learning radius and diameter? What a fun lesson- but it’s all being learned through them needing to build the ball-bearing turning apparatus for their display about community helpers they’re creating for a doctor’s office waiting room, which other kids can interact with! Listen to these conversations and the deep brain-firings for problem-solving and mental math!

So much goes into mapping out Quests (and the kids are very involved in the path of that) and making them rich with learning experiences! The learning and skills are visible and transferable to life skills to have for now and in the future!

Our 2/3rd level learners have been studying and working with a professional water table over six feet long and learning a ton about geography and land formations. They were passionate about this, so they wanted to create their own big water table so others could interact with learning. This young man showed me their 3d print jobs they designed on their own and are printing out to display his ideas and what he learned and was energized by to present on. He’s in second “grade”! We love what we do, and swing these kids to get such a rich learning experience, they are excited about!

When 4/5th level kids saw a need at a local farm, they set out to serve that need as just 1️⃣ of their tasks they chose to tackle for the first Quest! (they also have created tallow for beauty products starting from a huge piece of frozen meat, made chicken boxes for their baby chickens they're raising and tending to in the coop, composting all lunch and trash at school they can for the garden boxes, canning jams… amongst tons of other learning!) Figuring out how to make a big pig’s feed trough sturdy enough that she can’t move it was challenging, and they decided on a concrete one. So these young learners had to design and develop mold prototypes, build the wooden/metal mold/frame, and then fill it with concrete. But they first had to figure out how much concrete they needed, mix it, and pour it. Building the frame/mold was challenging because everything must be done in reverse. Calculating how much concrete you need and then how many bags of it to purchase to get what you need is also huge math for these young minds. … and they did it ALL!

✨Mindshifts by Head of School, Mr. Podoll ✨ The world has and continues to change, as do career options and skills needed in a fast-paced world. We are quite different with our competency-based/design-thinking model versus most schools that still operate using the Factory Model of the 1920s. Reach out if you are curious 🧐 what we are doing! We are always happy to share!

Help support Vandermont!

We are excited to announce our calendar fundraiser for the year!

Please help us reach our goal of $15K to go towards our Quest!

Quests: Learning with Purpose

-Real challenges with real learning

-Projects that make a difference

-Building creativity and teamwork

Click the link given to you by your family/friend and donate. Or, donate to this general Vandermont link: https://calendar.paramountfundraising.com/6da0bunbut1m6bbm1bipeujs0r

Thank you!