Writing Prompt 4/300: Write a diary entry, dated 10 in the future.

​Writing Prompt 4/300: Write a diary entry, dated 10 in the future.

Dear diary…

It’s the end of the first week of school. J just started grade 5. How time flies! Every first week of school brings on a flurry of emotions. The summer is over. Routine sets in. We’ve come down off the high of birthday week and the long weekend. We will be spending this weekend relaxing and catching up on errands. I don’t know why but the list of to-dos always starts to accumulate towards September. I guess because it is sort of like a second New Year. 

I always breathe a sigh of relief when J comes home from school and is excited about his teacher and the year ahead. This year, like every other year I have some really fun extra curricular activities for J planned. We will follow his lead and let him pick a few learning journeys. Who knows where that will take us. Last year we ended up going a 14 hikes to look for dinosaur eggs and to the museum a hundred times to make sure we were going to the right places. I love these learning journeys because we can really dig into J’s interests and he loves spending time researching, planning and make sure he gets the most out of his days. Last year J’s teacher was super supportive of the learning journeys and didn’t even bat an eye at the days away from the classroom. It really sucked the year before that was a little bit more of a sell. His third grade teacher wasn’t nearly as open to alternative learning as I would have liked. Which ultimately led me to creating a handbook on alternative learning meets classroom learning so that more parents could feel empowered to work with their kids teachers on creating experiential learning plans. I know that it is hard to sometimes battle the norms of routine and established roles and not everyone is as persistent as I am about it. 

And fall always marks the half way point of The Designership. Funny how when we started 10 years ago we followed the normal flow of the school year but quickly found that it wasn’t as conducive to learning as one might think. Ever since we made the switch to utilizing the summer for more working time following the Spring launch, fall brings energy to getting new voices into Studio. This year we will be celebrating 10 time capsules and going back to look at where we started and hosting triple the number of voices. It gonna be huge! 

Ok, I can’t start thinking about it too much or il never go to sleep. Alright diary time to go to bed. 

Talk to you later.