SPOTLIGHT - 2021: Cultivating actions to harvest habits

MAGAZINE

1202 * YRAURBEF

SPOTLIGHT

CULTIVATING THE SEEDS TO GROW A GARDEN

WHEN A PROJECT IS BORN UNDERSTAND HOW CONTENT ENTERS THE PBL STRUCTURE

A YEAR OF ONLINE EDUCATION

Cultivating the seeds to grow a garden.

KINDNESS CALENDAR Simple actions that can create a happier world.

ONE YEAR OF ONLINE EDUCATION Enzo Brena, Educational Technology Coordinator of Concept Ribeirão Preto shares his perceptions.

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WHAT STORIES TEACH US

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IMPACT WALL

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CONTENTS

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EDITORIAL

Luciana Fusco, educator at Concept Ribeirão Preto, reflects on the stories and socio-emotional development.

Traga sua ideia para virar um projeto de impacto na Escola Concept.

WHEN A PROJECT IS BORN Keep up with the class of 1st year B in São Paulo since the beginning of the project.

NEW SCHOOL SUPPLIES Notebooks, binders and folders for better study organization.

CONCEPT SP ANNIVERSARY From a dream to a new education paradigm in three years.

PREVIOUS EDITIONS

Envolva-se em nossa comunidade por meio da revista Spotlight.

CULTIVATING THE SEEDS TO GROW A GARDEN The seeds and seedlings that we gave to students at the beginning of this year carry many symbols and intentions that we wish to cultivate with our school community. In order for the plant to grow and be transported to a larger pot, perhaps even a flower bed or garden, it needed to be watered and cared for daily. Many students and families gave some kind feedback to us, telling us how pleasurable and powerful this activity was in their homes.

We believe that it is through constant repetition of certain acts that we are able to develop habits. Families that have been at Escola Concept for some time already know that the idea of developing habits is almost a mantra in our educational journey.

We speak of "habits of mind" when we want to develop skills such as listening with understanding and empathy, managing impulsivity, and thinking flexibly.

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2021

L AI R O TI D E We use "visible thinking routines" to encourage learners to make their ideas visible to others, and search for connections and critical thinking, in a constant process of reflection on learning, also known as metacognition.

The projects explored in the classroom have a repeatable cycle, from the definition of the theme to the presentations at the Festival of Learning.

CURIOSITY, IDEA, RESEARCH, ACTION, REFLECTION, CELEBRATION.

REPEAT! In this edition of the digital magazine SPOTLIGHT, published every month, one of the stories shows just how projects take shape in our school. In another, we suggest you download and follow the tips of the "Kindness Calendar". We also have articles written by our collaborators, we have a reflection about hybrid learning by Enzo Brena, coordinator of technology at Escola Concept Ribeirão Preto, and another article about socio-emotional skills, that are at the center of the revolution that started happening in the field of education, written by Luciana Fusco, an educator at Escola Concept Ribeirão Preto.

Shall we cultivate learnings, day after day?

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KINDNESS CALENDAR Join us by becoming a "KindActivist"! To begin, download the calendar with actions you can take to help create a happier and kinder world.

CAMILA ICASSATTI - Communications and Design Lead

Leave a note on the public restroom mirror that says: You look amazing!

Sing at the top of your lungs in your car or shower.

Flávia De Souza Meirelles Urquiza Take fresh baked goods to a guard, police, fire station, or hospital with a note of thanks for their service.

Get out and explore! Be a tourist in your own city for a day.

Refrain from complaining today.

Those are some of the tips and ideas you will find in the 2021 Kindness Calendar, created by The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. Since 2018, Escola Concept supports the initiative by sharing the calendar with its team of educators and celebrating International Peace Day, on September 21st, and World Kindness Day 2021, on November, 13th.

Join us by becoming a "KindActivist"!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR CALENDAR

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WHAT'S NEXT? As you may know, Escola Concept also added to the school’s official calendar other international date celebrations that we believe are worth reflecting on. In March we will have the International Womens' Day (March, 8th) and World Poetry Day (March 21st). Around these dates, educators will connect the topics to their learning plans, according to their groups' age and projects. Make sure to ask your children what they have done or discussed in class for Women's Day and Poetry Day. Share your feedback with us afterward!

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A YEAR-LONG JOURNEY OF ONLINE LEARNING The educator ENZO BRENA, Educational Technology Coordinator at Escola Concept Ribeirão Preto, shares his perceptions and balance in almost a year of online teaching and learning.

It's been a long journey since we were challenged with making the transition to online teaching and learning. From March 2020 to today it's been nearly a year of a complex, challenging process, one which is full of learning for both our families and our educators. More recently in October, making the jump to hybrid teaching was a very demanding task for our community, however, it has been greatly facilitated by our passion for innovation and problem-solving.

We have learned and developed quite a lot at this point. Certainly, we are a different community from when we first started, however, I cannot fail in seeing how this whole ordeal has made us stronger and more capable as a whole.

Of course, our educators were always empowered with the skills and knowledge necessary to make this

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transition, but this does not mean they have not learned anything from the process.

We, as educators, have learned how it feels to be inside our families' homes, what it is like to be a part of the family routine on a whole other level, a much more private one. We observed and reinforced the necessity for empathy, for relating with our learners’ challenges and strengths on a deeper level. Being challenged to teach in a virtual environment has only reinforced the skills that we knew to be elementary and necessary to the learning process. We have understood how to communicate even more clearly, how to think more flexibly, how to find more humor, we have searched for new strategies to make thinking and learning visible.

Understanding their needs, wants, and fears, working every day to address them and improve their experience has taught us much when it comes to communication, expectations, and excellence in family services.

I find it completely fascinating how our educational community could take a very challenging context and use it to, not only achieve our goals of providing human and meaningful educational experiences but also achieving international visibility and recognition in doing so.

It has also been an amazing journey to assist and watch our families navigate through learning how to cope with the school being "brought home", so to speak. Our parents and learners have taken this challenge head-on and never ceased trying to learn, develop, and help us perfect our process. Their partnership during this entire process has, undoubtedly, been one of the keys to our success.

This has been quite a journey, full of learning and development for our community. Learning the ways of maintaining an excellent, human and meaningful relationship with education and our families through it has undoubtedly fortified our school like never before. The questions that rest before us now are even more intriguing and make me more and more eager to pursue them: what experiences from hybrid teaching can help us improve our learning process on campus? How will we resignify our in-person moments when we can finally make the transition back to full-time on campus? What are the next steps for maintaining our excellence process once back full-time?

One thing I am sure, especially after working through such a rich process as this one, with a community as strong, innovative, and tight as ours, there is nothing we cannot achieve.

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Correlation between habits of mind and emotions cultivated by stories Luciana Fusco

Stimulating and developing socioemotional skills are at the center of the revolution that has already begun in schools. In the most diverse situations of life, emotional intelligence and control provide support and tools that are important to deal with frustrations, diversity, problems… They help the person to be conscious of their emotions, to be able to show affection, and to solve problems in a responsible way.

These aspects are related to behaviors developed since childhood, through experiences in school, with families and friends. In several different situations, emotional intelligence is

NOTHING LIKE A GOOD STORY TO FILL US 212 2 | s p o t l i g h t - f e b r u a r y 2 0 2 1

the key to recognize and evaluate our own feelings and also the feelings of others, as well as deal with them.

Interactions provided by having

Talking about emotions, we can refer

contact with stories allow children to

to internal reactions or the ones

learn how to assume new postures in

manifested by children when they

front of environmental stimuli, to

interact with characters. A story

develop thought patterns, to unveil

unravels confused feelings that need to

emotions. Stories stir feelings that

be managed. Kids need help to handle

contribute to the formation of the

these feelings, that lead to new ways of

child's personality, psychological and

thinking about their own hard or

emotional maturity. They stimulate

intense feelings.

identity based on living models,

Stories can minimize anguishes, bring

develop ways of thinking, reflecting,

peace and show that there are always

and acting. Experienced feelings tangle

solutions for problems, as there are

with imagination, stimulate

always creative ways, possibilities and

expressions in drawings, songs, writing,

actions, showing that obstacles can be

reading, thoughts, and games.

overcome.

According to Vygostky (1987),

Stories are tools, opportunities for

whichever the way of thought -

approximation, stimulation to

emotional representations,

reproducing gestures, games,

imagination, fantasy, or logical thinking

behaviors… According to Freire

- it has an emotion as its foundation.

(2005), “the reading of the world

The habits of the mind are responses to

precedes that of the word, that is, the

situations, solutions not immediately

human being is able to interpret

known. We are interested in observing

everyday situations even before

how students produce knowledge and

knowing how to read ”.

act in the face of challenging conditions that require strategic reasoning, perception, perseverance, creativity.

We are not interested in how many answers the students give us, but in how they behave, even when they do not discover the right answer.

Stories create stimuli and opportunities approach

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THE H T I W N HAVE FU ND! I M F O HABITS TERS! L I F M A STAGR

IN TRY OUR

How about you? What are the Habits of Mind that help you the most? At Escola Concept, we believe that through the habits of mind people can build new behaviors and a growth mindset that lead us to success.

Let's begin with the habit of finding humor? Scan the QR Code or CLICK HERE to try our filter and draw a habit that fits for you today!

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Sow a thought, and you reap an act; Sow and act, and you reap a habit; Sow a habit and you reap a character; Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

CHARLES READE

THE IMPACT WALL WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR ANOTHER PERSON OR COMMUNITY? BRING YOUR IDEA TO BECOME AN IMPACT PROJECT AT SCHOOL CONCEPT

This year we chose the book “The Giving Tree” as the theme of the year, which talks about GRATITUDE and the wisdom involved in acts of giving and receiving. Thinking about it, we decided to listen to our community of parents, learners, and educators, about what actions or projects they want to develop during this year to positively impact a group or a person.

This is how the IMPACT WALL came about, a wall with envelopes of ideas, where you can give one and get one.

Until the end of March, we are in the stage of collecting the ideas from our community, which will be created by learners with their classmates in class and can also be sent by families through email to communications@conceptedu.com.br.

The second phase will be to choose which ideas to put into practice. This is a long-term project that we will monitor and make happen during this year.

Let's cause impact!

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STEP 1 Define who these people are: what do they need? Do they belong to our community or not?

STEP 2 Define the objective and think about what you need to make your idea happen.

Your proposal must be viable, keeping in mind that who will work on it is a group of children, using the resources and people from our school community.

STEP 3 Write and / or draw a picture on paper to symbolize that idea. Write down your family or class name on paper.

STEP 4 Bring the paper to school, to be placed in one of the envelopes by the end of March!

STEP 5 We will select some ideas and give them to a group of students to be responsible for putting them into practice.

spotlight - fevereir

WHEN A PROJECT IS BORN Join the Grade 1 B class in São Paulo to understand how a project comes to life at Escola Concept. To explain the journey, please welcome the educator Rafaela Fonseca!

Raising curiosity Before starting a project, the educator observes, documents, and maps recurring interests. He/she creates provocative contexts for students to express themselves, especially at the beginning of the year, when they have had little time to get to know the class. "In grade 1B we started our project reading The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein, the book that inspires our 2021 school year at Escola Concept. Learners were very touched by the story, yet some thought it was too sad. So I asked them to write down what they would do differently from the boy in the book - it was a good assessment for their writing skills. We produced, as a group, an artistic installation in our hallway, to display the compositions over paintings and pictures. In addition to that, we created sculptures of the things the 'boy' got with the help of the 'giving tree', such as a boat and a house."

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Math, Language, Arts, History...

Essential Questions Each project at Escola Concept is different from the other because, as part of the learning plans, educators consider the previous knowledge and curiosities that learners share. From this active listening, an essential question is defined to guide the project.

In the case of Grade 1B, it is 'What do people learn over time?'. It encompasses other questions such as 'What were your greatest achievements in life?', 'What can we do to take care of nature?', and 'How can we record our memories?'

As a Project-Based Learning school, the contents, or subjects as we used to say in traditional schools, are integrated within the project environment. "The questions learners had related to Nature, for instance, had much to do with the life-cycle of trees and the use of natural resources.

Kids asked how long it takes for a seed to become a tree, wondered if the boy could build a house with rocks instead of wood, and this was a 'bingo'!

According to the BNCC, the educator should explore these matters with 6years-old learners.

Connection with BNCC The essential questions, in their turn, are associated with contents from Base Nacional Comum Curricular that are expected to be taught during that specific grade level. "As we discussed the story, I wrote down the topics that kids were curious about. Then, we clustered the ideas in understanding maps, which is a tool to help make learners' thinking visible. We ended up with three big subthemes related to the book: Nature, Time and Housing." spotlight - february 2021 | 19

They also thought about how they would act when they grow up, and we are going to talk about memory and its relation to history, which lead to the third big subtheme, housing, because we are going to research how people used to build houses in the past and compare it to how it is done now. Basic counting from Algebra, and shapes, from Geometry, for instance, will be key elements to build a mock-up of a house. I am thinking about challenging learners to build a pau-apique model."

Impact on daily life Project-based learning involves students not only because their interests are taken into consideration, but because it shows how the topic impacts their daily lives and the lives of their communities, whether from a smaller circle, such as their family or group at school, or larger group, beyond the school walls. "We challenge students to promote solutions and make an impact. And we connect the project with a Sustainable Development Goal, which helps children realize that everything makes sense in a much larger sphere. The Global Goal that best summarizes the challenges of this project is Life on Earth ".

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Next steps Grade 1B enters a phase now in which the educator relaunches questions, evaluates interactions, documents, reevaluates the process and begins to think with the group the first culmination ideas, which will be presented at the Festival of Learning. "By investigating how we can record memories, we can possibly get a good idea of how to materialize learning."

Now that you understand the PBL environment, catch up with your child's learning and be amazed at how this approach leads to meaningful connections and really deep, serious learning!

Y YE ES S,, W WE E H HA AV VE E S SC CH HO OO OL L S SU UP PP PL LIIE ES S F FO OR R A AL LL L L LE EA AR RN NE ER RS S!!

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Academic Rigor, organization, focus on growth and development... it’s the time of the year to connect all of these topics to our supplies!

The material is color coded by age group.

Early Years (Toddlers 1 to Kindergarten): yellow Lower School Grade 1* to Grade 5): orange Middle School (grade 6 to grade 9): blue High School (Grade 10): purple. *The orange color for Grade 1 follows the formal Lower School division, even though here at Escola Concept we consider Grade 1 as part of Early Years.

Aiming at helping learners with organization and study skills, we have created a new set of Escola Concept materials 2021, with different kinds of notebooks, binders, and folders that have already started being distributed to learners.

Each notebook has a different cover, depending on the purpose it serves.

There are notebooks for Math (graph paper), Writers Workshop (lined paper), General Notes, Drawings, Pedagogical Documentation, and documentation of the learning process.

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We look forward to observing and guiding our learners in documenting their progress, growth, and development on the pages of these notebooks.

HAPPY CONCEPT DAY!

On February 20th, 2021, we celebrated the São Paulo campus's third anniversary offering a cupcake for the learners during snack time and sharing a video with our internal team, also published in our social media.

Have you seen it?

Scan or Click here to watch the video 24 | spotlight - february 2021

"From a dream to a reality, Escola Concept has redefined the meaning of education.

And you are part of making this happen!"

* Photo taken in 2019

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