Hackschooling update

This week we've learned a lot about democracy. It takes a looong time!

On Tuesday we watched Logan La Plante's TED talk about hackschooling and asked, What is school? What is it for? Why?

Logan La Plante says hackers are people who challenge or change systems to make them better. We came up with our own definition for hacking:

Then we talked about what we'd like to keep in/change in/remove from our class.

We decided that we wanted to hack our classroom, both the physical environment, and the ways we run the class. The kids are making lots more of the decisions and self-managing more than the teacher. Yesterday we got rid of lots of the things we don't need in our classroom, changed our tote tray system and moved lots of books around. It got pretty messy!

Whenever we want to make a decision about something, we listen to each others' ideas and then have a vote. Today, in groups, we're making plans for how we want to organise our classroom and our learning:

We're going to present our ideas to each other and then we'll have a vote.

This afternoon we're putting any furniture we don't need anymore outside, and having an inorganic rubbish collection with the other classes (V2, V6) who are also hackschooling this week. We'll go around and look at what each other has discarded and see if we'd like to use anything they don't want anymore.