All Hands on Deck: Creativity Floats at the 9th Long-View Cardboard Boat Regatta

Every spring, there’s a singular energy that builds in our community—a blend of anticipation, nervous excitement, and the unmistakable rustle of cardboard. On May 2, the Loop 360 Boat Ramp Park came alive as we held our ninth annual Cardboard Boat Regatta. Seventeen boats, each thoughtfully crafted by our learners, took to the waters of Lake Austin in a spirited event that highlights creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration.

We’re especially grateful to Travis County Parks for providing this beautiful park as the perfect setting—open space and sparkling water—for our event. This treasured community resource created an inspiring backdrop for our students to put their ideas to the test.

But the regatta is about much more than launching boats on the water. It’s a hands-on exploration of physics, problem-solving, and resilience. Over several weeks, teams worked together to design, build, and refine their boats, learning firsthand about buoyancy, balance, and resilience….

Learning How To Learn

Like other teachers and learners all over the country, we are adjusting to the rhythms of a new school year at Long-View and finding our way in new iterations of our learning community. As discussed in many of our posts, including this one from last spring, the idea of “learning community” is integral to the way we do school at Long-View.

These ideas may feel a bit foreign to many learners and even parents or teachers, since many of us (likely) were educated in classrooms that engaged in very traditional, behavioristic pedagogy. As adults who want to help children further contemplate these ideas, we might ask questions such as:

What are you realizing you might do differently to increase your own learning? What is different about a class that functions as a “learning community”? Learning is messy and hard work…what are you realizing is important to do in order to increase learning for yourself and others?

It is quite a journey for most kids to fully understand the ideas behind these questions. At Long-View, new learners get a lot of support from their peers who have been at our school for multiple years....

generalLisa ZapalacAugust 29, 2024Long-View Micro Schoolnew year, learning, community, drive your learning

Community Conversation Recap (Nov. 2023)

Across the year on a handful of Fridays, we schedule time for “Community Conversations” — the aim of these conversations is to help the adults in our community come together to discuss ways we can support our learners. Our first Community Conversation of the 2023-24 year occurred last week. We created a reel on Instagram highlighting a few key points, and we hope, paired with this blog, those who were there can reflect more on the discussion and those who were not can feel included in the conversation.

We began with Claire Rudden (math content leader for Gold Band) giving an overview of the personal finance series we are in the midst of during Monday morning Campfires. We are working to make sure all learners have exposure to aspects of personal finance through this teacher-led Campfire series, which spans three weeks. Last week, the four options for Campfire centered around saving money. Yesterday, the four options taught about various aspects of spending money. And the week after Thanksgiving break, we plan to have four options teaching about investing….

generalLisa ZapalacNovember 14, 2023Long-View Micro Schoolparents, community, campfire, financial literacy, challenge

Tailgate: Kicking Off Community Building

Building community is at the heart of our work at Long-View. We believe learning is accelerated through meaningful interactions with others. Furthermore, we believe families should be involved in creating a culture of learning that blurs the lines of “school learning” and outside learning. We cannot achieve that end if we do not involve families in developing meaningful relationships with us (the school and staff) and with each other. Thus, to begin and reconnect those relationships, we kick off each school year with an event we call the Parent Tailgate….

GeneralLisa ZapalacAugust 25, 2018Long-View Micro Schoolcommunity, parents, tailgate, back to school

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