Thursday, March 28, 2024

Home Link 2020

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At Ski Hill on a recent Tuesday, the air held a damp chill, mist clung to the hillsides, trees dripped, and the snow was heavy and saturated. The arriving Home Link students, clad in colorful snow clothes, and their teachers, paras and parent helpers, didn’t mind at all.

“The real-life experience of weather is a great curriculum if we translate the experience into opportunities to problem solve, manage ourselves, collaborate, and expand our awareness of the world around us,” said Home Link teacher Shanda Holm.

Fellow Home Link teacher, Daena Medina, shared how weather creates a learning opportunity. “Have you ever studied how water can change a landscape while you stomp your way up a rain-soaked, muddy mountain trail? Suddenly, it becomes a practical and memorable lesson.”

Home Link is a hybrid home-based education alternative offered by the Cascade School District. They have been able to meet in-person outside since mid-October.

On this particular day, the students were wrapping up an experiential education unit on orienteering. They divided into groups of older and younger grades. Holm took her group and made a large circle—there was no shortage of space—for a warm-up. Not only did the warm-up get the blood pumping, Holm explained, “It’s also an opportunity for everyone to lead, with their voice and their body.” Each child led an exercise and some were quite creative, like jumping while spinning in a circle twenty times or dropping to their knees and arching back to touch their head to their heels.

Next Holm led a discussion about what to pack in their backpacks to provide comfort for two and a half hours in the increasingly wintry weather. Lining the pack with a garbage bag makes for easy waterproofing. Extra hats, gloves, and even socks would be helpful if the clouds started dumping rain.

As for orienteering, several students had never held a map when this unit began a couple weeks ago. When Holm asked where south was, the class had pointed in every direction. Holm had then asked, “Where’s Whistlepunk Ice Cream?” and they had all pointed toward downtown. After students learned to orient their laminated maps with a compass, they now unanimously point south, which happens to coincide with the direction of Whistlepunk.

This day they were going to review the trickiest part of the orienteering course, navigating between two checkpoints on the map (corresponding to flagged trees). The students could following a meandering trail, but, as student Cosimo Terranella noted, “The bushwhack is faster, but you could get lost.” To avoid that, they took a bearing and combined it with known distance to find the second checkpoint.

There’s a sense of normalcy that is refreshing. Everyone wears masks, but they take mask breaks when they’re spread out and not crossing paths with another group. On a cold day like this one, the masks add a bit of coziness. So much so, that when asked about masks, one student said, “It’s part of my face now,” and another replied, “It’s like my best friend.”

The kids all agreed that class outside was fun. They liked to “walk around,” “run around” and “not be stuck inside in a chair.” These students are all taking other courses via Zoom, such as math, Spanish or cooking.

Holm explained the educational foundation on which this class is built. “Students develop skill sets in team building, leadership, communication and awareness, while focusing on daily learning units such as orienteering, biodiversity, tracking, shelter building, knots and mapping.”

Curiosity-led learning is pervasive. Medina recalled, “I enjoyed when the second and third graders paused to watch a woodpecker and then pooled their knowledge to figure out why it pecks holes in the trees.”

Holm gave another example. “Some students did a survey of ponderosa pines and found to their amazement that almost all the trees had significantly more moss on the north side. Another student noticed the south side of the tree smells stronger of vanilla than the north side—it was a sunny warm day. The other students confirmed the findings.”

Holm and Medina model adaptive behavior for their students. Both are new to the Cascade School District. And, as Holm said, “Teaching students in-person is one of the best parts. The hard part was the volume of work required to gear up for the year when the program doubled, and a pandemic threw off the ‘normal’ form and function of the program.”

The enrollment of eighty children in Home Link this year shows that a large number of families are willing to do the homeschooling half of the partnership. “I’ve been impressed with the commitment of parents to reach out for support and adjust their teaching strategies as they learn what works and what doesn’t for their family,” said Holm.

Home Link students are getting safe social time with classmates, exploring, and learning new concepts. It’s no surprise to hear third grader Micah Villalobos say, “My favorite part of the week is this class.”

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