An Invitation to the Room Nine Community School

Jump on, join in! Shed your sense of what school should be, leaving it next to your memories of what school was like for you. Prepare for something different. Put on your kid-colored glasses. Enter this learning community of endless possibilities with an open mind and a receptive heart.

Look around. You might not be able to tell where we start and end. Kids are in the space outside the classrooms running a post office or learning to knit from a parent. Some of us are on a field trip to downtown Seattle to investigate architecture, or down the hall practicing our band instruments. Some of us are writing at a desk or table, some of us are using the floor. We are cooking in the kitchen or reading in the loft. If it is the beginning of the day we are in the Commons at our morning meeting, asking questions of a guest speaker, learning a traditional work song, or celebrating someone's birthday. Tonight parents are meeting to plan a school trip. Tomorrow we are going to the wetlands, to an art museum, to the theatre, to a genetics lab, to outdoor camp, or to the stars!

Things seem to flow, cheerfully chaotic, with a purpose you may not be able to name; but stay for a while, and someone will offer a hand and a tour. You will see us using a wide variety of tools and resources as we work on the student store, teach someone older than us to fold an origami crane, feed the finches, share strategies for multiplication, read silently, prepare a PowerPoint presentation, or learn about rocketry from a parent mini-class. We are working alone, we are working together, we are working hard and we are working joyfully.

Listen deeply. How are we showing what we know? Kids are choosing work for their portfolios, rating their friendship skills on a continuum, discussing and listing criteria for quality handwriting. They are running their own parent/student/teacher conferences, writing daily goals, or identifying all the skills used in a drama lesson. You might hear a scholar mentoring an apprentice, or a novice trying something for the first time, or a practitioner working independently.

Be a detective and uncover the foundation that holds us up. What are the community agreements and beliefs about learning that we share? Can you see evidence of our focus on discovering problems and seeking information to solve them, or for our focus on using strategies for thinking, for making connections, for seeing ourselves in a social context, for teaching and valuing each other, and for taking time to work and succeed?

Time to go already? When you see us again, our settings, and the tools we use, and our schedule will have changed, just as we grow and change as learners. Our steadfast covenant remains the same: we will continue to travel together, students, parents and teachers, "to boldly go where no school has gone before.”

Jump on, join in! There is much joy to be had in the journey.

To schedule a school tour, call our PIE/PTSA Parent Registrar, Shereen Allen at (206) 365-2238 or send an e-mail to shereena@msn.com