Tag: school

  • Guest Author: Charlotte <3

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    Charlotte, my seven-year-old friend from QIV-C, has been hanging out with ALC-NYC and Cloudhouse these past few days we’ve visited her home. Here’s a guest post from her: I liked when my sled was going really fast, last night. With Eric, Abby, Chuck, and Javair. I kept falling out of my sled, which was funny.…

  • Oh! I found an old blog post draft on my hard drive (from 10.17)

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    Monday didn’t really feel like a Monday, since we rolled into it after having ALF-ed through the weekend upstate. I love getting to play with wonderful adults and hang in beautiful Chatham, but there’s always a point where I become impatient to come back to the kids. We filled the weekly schedule board! We cheered…

  • Whirlwind and Peace

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    I’m curled up, warm in a sunny window, a little bit amazed at how much organized chaos filled the beginning of the week. This weekend, I had a guest and a staff working day (in which @ryanshollenberger and @tomis gave the bathroom an amazing make-over!). We rolled into the week Tuesday morning with the arrival…

  • Alchemist Book Discussion: Part 2

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    @failspy and I both finished reading The Alchemist over the weekend, so we reconvened today for philosophy part two. Right away, Javair found the line that evokes ALC/alt.ed. philosophy: “There is only one way to learn and that’s through action” (p 125). Ummmm….yes. Were we both newer to this actually-thinking-about-industrial-schooling business, we would probably have…

  • The Alchemist: part 1 discussion

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    @failspy and I are reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It’s been seven years and several lives since I last read it, so Javair’s invitation to revisit and discuss it appealed to me immediately. Today we sat for an hour with the book, our notes (his mental, mine written), and Wikipedia for our first “mini-philosophy” about…

  • Last week before the break!!!

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    My week started gettin’ agile Sunday evening, when @bear and the Cloudhouse crew arrived at my apartment to join Brandon and I and our Polish quantum physicist friend for the biggest sleepover I’ve had in years 🙂 Monday, the weather was BEAUTIFUL! So a group of us took off to climb rocks, picnic, draw, hide-and-seek,…

  • A basic question…

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    Last week, I finally recorded the story-line of an MM game @thewitchqueen908 DMed. At the end of the game, my character finally makes it to the lair of the great golden dragon to ask for an apprenticeship. The great golden dragon asks whether the little dragon wants friendship and wisdom or just power. After being…

  • Chuck comes to school!

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    Today I had the delight of bringing two wonderful friends to school, not-so-secretly hoping that they would fall in love and want to awaken their potential ALFs. Vincent and Chuck both live in Rhode Island now, working to build and run summer programs on a tall ship, but I met them first in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.…

  • Body Worlds!!!

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    Thanks to curiosity of students, generosity of parents, and agility of facilitators, I had the opportunity to support a really interesting field trip this week. @RyanShollenberger , @douglasawesome , @likeaboss , @kingthanos , @FailSpy, Elijah, and I went to the Body Worlds exhibit at Discovery Times Square. It was so exciting to get to go…

  • The week it got cold.

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    Recipe for (mostly) quiet productivity (of the most joyful kind): Ingredients 2 visiting students 1 guest observer @Ninablanco and @Tomis back from travels Geva, with many offerings 🙂 Foam puzzle-piece mats for forts A culture committee meeting A field trip to Body Worlds An arduino + Nintendo controller project Splatter paint project New woodshop projects…

  • Scribbles for Grammar

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    Douglas has been playing this game called Scribblenauts that I’m really enjoying. His character gets missions to do minor helpful things for people he encounters and larger heroic things for super-heroes who summon him. To play, Douglas types in nouns to conjure different items he wants. He can also click on objects and characters to…

  • Ink on my hands

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    I started a new project this week. Writing every day for November reminded me how much I love creative work (the invisible kind I do at school, but also the kinds with more concrete outcomes), so over the weekend I bought a sketchbook. It’s my first sketchbook since high school, and I’m nervous each time…

  • I asked a bunch of people, “What is MM?”

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    “D and D without all the papers and things to remember. And it changes depending on who’s telling the story. Crated by people who were astonishingly bored and had an astonishing knowledge of D and D and medieval times and magic. It’s a combination of what the DM wants to have happen and what the…

  • WikiTrails from 11/4

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    Even with Ryan upstate, @timotree and I ran WikiTrails in its normal Tuesday time slot. We used the “random article” button to generate our start points, and we took turns choosing our end points. We had a full half hour scheduled, and I expected to get one or two rounds in before GeoGuesser time. We…

  • Why I’m cool with day-long Doctor Who marathons…

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    Yesterday, Adin came in and offered to host a 5-hour Doctor Who marathon. The projector glow mingled with the hum of recorded voices, and the resulting spell pulled passers-by through the door to the Red Room. Some kids powered through the whole marathon while others dropped in and out as they pleased. I was invited…

  • Tools and Practices: Set-the-Week in ALCNY

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    Every Monday we have a meeting called Set-The-Week (STW for short) where we schedule our classes, events, and trips for the week. During the meeting, we record these “offerings” on a whiteboard with columns for each weekday. After the meeting, the offerings get posted on a daily schedule board in the lobby, on individual kanbans…

  • Wednesday Wanderings

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    Since @pinkpanda moves to Virginia soon, I asked her Monday if there was a last field trip she wanted to take, a part of the city she wanted to see before leaving. After some thinking, she declared that she wanted to take a field trip to a comic book store. While looking at a map…

  • I <3 October

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    But really. It’s my favorite month. Leaves are changing, I get to wear sweaters, apples and chrysanthemums are everywhere…I also might love spookiness and Halloween, as @jacobcb noticed and meme’d. OH! And we’ve been in school just long enough that we get to stop talking about structures as much and just doing all the cool…

  • B(a)M!!!

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    When my cousin mentioned that the Brooklyn Museum had just opened a new exhibit called “Killer Heels,” I heard FIELD TRIP! But would kids interested in more than high heels come? Kind of. @jacobcb @pinkpanda and @ninablanco all came, and I declared an intention of not directing us through the museum. They agreed to support me…

  • Muse Field Trip (from earlier in October)

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    In one of my many past lives, I spent most of my time near, on, or thinking about how to be better at being on horses. My teacher and mentor once suggested taking gymnastics classes to improve my balance. What she actually said was, “It will teach you to fall safely, and that’s important since…