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Blenders
The Blenders Community of Learners hope to produce a student
with a life-long interest in learning, with solid experience
in self direction, goal selection, and community membership,
equipped with the requisite basic skills and confident in
her/his capacity for success because she/he has experienced
success. The following are tenets of our philosophy which
support this aspiration:
- Shared responsibility for the development of
the curriculum and educational environment
a. Active parent participation in the educational program brings about an integration between home and school. Children experience education within an "extended family" network and come to perceive learning as a life experience in which all ages are involved all of the time.
b. Shared decision making between parents and teachers keeps the program viable and flexible to meet with changing populations and changing needs.
- Experiential Learning
The emphasis is on learning by doing. There is a de-emphasis on lecture and rote centered learning. Children learn best when participating in concrete experiences where they are manipulating things and when ideas are tied to those experiences. For example observations and record keeping of the Coho Salmon eggs and fry in our aquarium give first hand experience in the life cycle of the salmon.
- Integrated Learning
Children learn best when that which they experience is connected as a whole. Reading, writing, computation are skills that should be used to give form to ideas and feelings but should not be divorced from the experience for then they become meaningless. Keeping a record of the growth of our salmon includes reading, writing, drawing, measuring and calculating, all essential skills but all integrated into a whole.
- Multiage Grouping
A variety of ages facilitates peer teaching, proximal learning, varied social interactions and acceptance of differences. It also provides a unique advantage for the teacher of being better able to know the needs of the children since they remain in our learning community for more than one year.
- Non-Graded Evaluations
Evaluations of the child's learning is done by the teachers, child and the parents through examples of her/his own work at her/his own unique pace rather than on comparative norms.
- Affective Education
How a child feels about her/his experience is as important as the experience itself. Development of a positive self concept within each child, the clarification of moral values and the development of appropriate social skills have as much importance in the Blenders curriculum as the basic academic skills of reading, writing and mathematics. It is our belief that this "holistic" approach to education not only produces a well rounded personality and productive member of the community but also facilitates the learning process further through the mechanism of self-reinforcement. Blended together they become interactive and interdependent.