An Orca Portrait: Walk through Orca and take it all in: self-portraits on one wall, insect projects on a table, a parent working with some children in the hall. Listen to students preparing to debate the Bill of Rights or chewing on a problem in a class meeting. Follow sounds out to the garden where children explore the links between seeds, water, dirt, sun and one another.
An Orca education is experienced together – staff, students, parents, and community members. Challenges offer learning opportunities: What’s really going on here? What choices could we make? What are other perspectives? Perhaps most importantly, how can we use this experience to learn and develop as a community?
Democracy is a complex endeavor and Orca aims to raise children who will participate fully. Our graduates can make their way in a world that requires strong academic skills, critical thinking, understanding differences and collaborative action.
Orca’s Guiding Values
Child Centered: Is it a radical notion that learning starts with the child? Making sense of experiences must become the language of learning for children and adults. Knowing children – what excites them, what they know and are ready for next and how they learn best – is a form of caring. Empowered students understand their own strengths and needs. Orca explores the dance between curriculum that emerges from children’s interests and lessons that develop essential skills. Our teaching places children at the center of learning.
Connections: Connections build bridges across personal and cultural divides. Success means participating in a democratic process and linking freedom with responsibility. High expectations and strong academic preparation for children of all races are prerequisites for empowered activism. Understanding differences is essential in a multicultural community working against racism and other biases. At the same time we must nurture connections with our planet. Environmental science is about planting seeds and knowing what it takes to make a garden grow. At Orca we work together with families to make connections for children.
Creativity: We believe children need to explore – to mess around with ideas and materials – and then build the discipline to examine what emerges. The arts are a model for exploration: try to express thoughts or feelings with toothpicks or sidewalk chalk, or maybe with a keyboard or your entire body. Exploration also allows scientists to imagine new answers – or new questions – and then develop experiments to evaluate their ideas. The human experience requires a willingness to take risks, follow threads to an uncertain end, and sit with mystery.
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