Home Learners Tuesday Pods

It is believed that the art of weaving has been around since ~3400 B.C., so any question of endurance has already been laid to rest. Textiles can survive in extraordinary conditions, and now more than ever, as a society, we are searching for things that possess more permanence.

We’ll use the first term of a new calendar year to teach students about the importance of dexterity. Using raw wool and handmade looms, Christianne will connect us with this rich tradition and starting from the very beginning, guide students comprehensively through their new practice. We’ll weave while we read The Secret Under My Skin by Janet McNaughton, a novel that underscores the importance of survival knowledge, as those who work with their hands ultimately rise to the top as the community deals with a technocast. Those who work with their head in the clouds struggle to surface.

As always, our Home Learning pods are guided by the group; autonomy is given to each learner as they are empowered to steer discussions in a direction meaningful to them, asking questions of their classmates as they dive deeper into their own theory building. 

There are so many layers to every person’s story that we can never truly understand the individual apart from their community. There is a  richness, however, that lies in listening to the intricate details of pit stops in the journey, following the heartbreaks and the hindrances that make someone whole. 

During this term we’ll engage with biographies of interesting individuals, with the selection being driven by both Christianne and the students themselves.  

Working in harmony with the stories we choose to explore, we’ll look at the techniques of portraiture as we craft our own. Emphasis will be placed on playing with colour and texture, making each feature unique to the person they’re depicting. After allowing students as much creative license as they’d like, we will photograph each portrait and collect them as a compilation of miniature gift labels. Originals will be kept by the artists.

Sets of 12 will be sold and the proceeds used to contribute to the Lyceum scholarship fund; involving students in the act of becoming philanthropists.

The world around us is constantly changing; shifting imperceptibly as things breathe, grow and settle in. No matter where we come from, or where we go, it is almost impossible not to come into contact with our vast and majestic oceans. 

We’ll spend our last term together looking at different types of coastal erosion, thinking about the ways in which we can combat/stall it and asking ourselves, “is it actually reversible?” Keeping up with our yearly tradition, this final term together will include a day trip to Saturna Island. To ground us in the local area, we’ll think about the many different ways in which sea creatures and plants have evolved here. This will begin with learning about forage fish as the baseline of our ecosystem; what enables them to thrive, and perhaps the ways in which we can help maintain their numbers. 

We will then direct our focus more specifically towards Winter Cove on Saturna Island and the erosion it has sustained in recent years; using our observations as a springboard to dive deeper into the patterns we see in front of us.  

Christianne will also be sure to dedicate a class to Loree Griffin Burns’s influential Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion. Using this well developed exploration, the group will deep dive into the notion of soft shoring, hard shoring, beachcombing and how island communities deal with protecting their properties and their community in an ecologically friendly way.