Welcome Back: Reflect & Rebuild

Happy 2017 BP Families!

We hope you had a wonderful respite over the holidays. We were more than ready for our return to school this week and to be back in the swing of things. We are so excited to continue to move Blueprint forward as we support your children on their path to self-discovery and academic growth.

Just as we encourage our students to reflect and evaluate their progress, we do as facilitators as well. The break gave us a wonderful opportunity to look back on what we have accomplished as a Blueprint family and design and implement our next steps. The adjustments, ideas and systems in place that we have planned for our spring semester will support students to grow more academically, monitor their progress and most importantly, grow a love for learning that will support their success not only in any school environment but also beyond the boundaries of school.

As you know, we began the year with “Foundations.” This was an 8 week establishment of foundational skills students needed in order to become designers of their own goals, projects, and schedules. During this time we taught a multitude of research skills, internet safety skills, note-taking strategies, design thinking foundations, peer review strategies, and more. With the culmination of foundations, we transitioned into "Project Immersion.” During this phase of learning, students wrote goals, researched information for various levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, prototyped, revised, questioned, and problem solved, all within a content they felt passionate about. As facilitators, we taught small group lessons that addressed content standards, reading strategies, vocabulary strategies and a variety of writing skills.

Presently, students will continue be supported further as they strive to accomplish personal goals in research, reading, writing, and content areas in social studies and science. Every student will be attending weekly workshops. The workshops will require students to link their work to a project goal they are striving to complete. There will be more influence on the nuclear family of students we call our "build class" so that teachers may support students more specifically according to instructional needs and truly personalize their schooling. We have also introduced a formal system for peer review. Twice a month, students will be asked to share their thinking, goals, and progress around their project with their peers. This will help students feel both empowered and accountable for their learning while they receive constructive feedback and ideas from their BP peers.

We continue to work towards the goal that Blueprint should be an educational experience that is personal, motivational, supportive, safe, and amazing. More than anything, we want our students to love school, learn to think and question more than ever before and of course, grow academically and socially. We are continually amazed by our students and want the most for them as we begin 2017. Thank you for being here, thanks for your support, and WELCOME BACK!

Love,

Team BP