Virtual School Classes in Action

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Virtual School Classes in Action

Visit the Enki Virtual Community School

Come have a look at the Virtual Community School in action! As is true in any school – or home, for that matter – no one day or one class can give you a full sense of the whole program, but you can get some feeling for the students and the overall approach. We offer a description of what the students are working with in each selection, to help you orient to the work they are doing. But of more importance – and the reason for the Virtual Community School – is the relationships between the students and between students and teachers.

We hope this will help parents decide if the Virtual Community School will serve their child. Meet the 2018 groups:

Virtual Visit 1 : The Middle East

Here the group is working with a story of Mohammed’s life and the roots of Islam. In these Humanities classes, we work with collaborative writing exercises, essays, and poetry. This particular day we are working with writing poems, using “parts of speech” as a supportive structure. You can hear their finished at the end of the recording.

Virtual Visit 2 : Mathematics in the European Renaissance

Take a peek into an Enki Virtual Community School Math class. In this case, the group is readying to work with Ratio and Proportion. This is approached through Fibonacci’s work with the golden ratio. The students have been studying the European Renaissance. In the first section of this recording, they are exploring the shift from the complexity of working with Roman Numerals to the simplicity of working with the Hindu-Arabic system we use today. This is to give them an experiential sense of how much the thinking of Europe was changingat this time. Because they are so familiar with the Hindu-Arabic approach to place value, they can easily experience the great shift to this approach. On this base, they explore proportion, working from their intuitive sense to a realization that they have an inherent sense of proportion. With this as their base, they will go on to nuts and bolts work with ratio and proportion.

Virtual Visit 3: Mechanics

We use many approaches to making this cyber school experiential; one approach is shown here. This one is begun at home, and then ideas are brought to be re-enacted and explored together, on screen. We also, at times, have discovery-activities the students can do onscreen in class time, and others they do at home, which they report on and we process together in class.

For this class, students had been assigned to figure out how to irrigate, moving water from a low river to a high field using only a rock, a bucket, and a rope. Then as seen here, we all looked at the different ideas together. This was a lead in to the studey of mechanics, starting with levers.

Virtual Visit 4 : Humanities

Have a peek into a Grade 8 Virtual Community School’s Humanities class. In this class, the group is studying revolution in Russia and the struggle for equality. They are reading the story of Ekaterina Breshkovsky, the Grandmother or the Peasant’s revolution, working with her childhood devotion to the peasants or serfs.

This group is also taking the next step in formalizing their essay writing skills. Have a look at the Enki website to see how their final work came out!

Virtual Visit 5 : Art Work, the European Renaissance

In this short clip you can see how we approach doing artistic work, online. In this case we have already worked with the initial principles of perspective: overlapping, intensity, height, size. Now the students are applying these principles to drawings and paintings of Venice, as part of their study of the European Renaissance.

Want to find out more about Enki Virtual Community School?