Welcome to the Falconsverse, the students' name for the many branches of the Falcons Learning Community. At present the Falconsverse consists of an in-person Falcons class in Sedgwick, Maine, an online Falcons class for students from a wide range of locations, plus tutoring and homeschool consulting students who join our community in other ways. A student newspaper serves to keep the community connected across all platforms, and students regularly start clubs based around their own interest. We also have a highly active parent club so that the adults can find community, too! Occasional smaller groups also form for extra-curricular tutoring or group lessons.
The Falcons classes form the backbone of the community, however, consisting of close-knit, multi-age groups of homeschool students who gather for two days a week to tackle interdisciplinary topics together. These groups provide practice learning independently in an intentional community setting with LOTS of hands-on involvement. In Falcons we believe that learning is living and vice versa, therefore class life is shaped to impart both the content and values we strive for in our students - including lots of fun and play, at every age level. Students can enroll in one class for two days a week, in both classes for four days a week, and/or for tutoring or other offerings to create the balance of freedom and instruction that best fits them, all while maintaining connection to others in a community that cares deeply about everyone in it. ​​
Students begin their days, both in person and online, by participating in the jobs necessary to make the program run, including setting up the classroom, caring for the materials, building the tools we use, assisting one another, and corresponding with visitors, volunteers, or absent students. This work builds ownership, teamwork, memory and spatial skills, and provides real-life context in which students can use and see the relevance of academic skills acquired in other aspects of the program.
After set up students spend much of the morning on communal skill-building assignments tailored to each individual’s learning levels. For older students, this often takes the form of a longer project through which they practice multiple skills, while younger students do shorter activities designed to build their confidence and enjoyment of learning before they enter into the sustained enthusiasm needed for longer projects.
The whole group gathers every day, sometimes multiple times. This Gathering allows us a chance to reflect on and intentionally develop our classroom life. Students identify difficulties and plot out community solutions, keeping our program ever-evolving and student designed. Gathering also serves as a lived civics curriculum where students actively study the nature of living together in community via reflecting on their own. Students use Town Meeting and/or Consensus methods to make decisions, and often test out and review solutions using the scientific method so that they can study these approaches in action as tools for tackling problems they care about.
Much of our learning also orbits around an overarching interdisciplinary thematic, which students work on together from multiple angles. Past topics include Resources, Heroism, Linguistics, and Living on the Earth. Students explore the ways in which these topics connect to both familiar and new skills and content and how to make their knowledge useful. A study of rocks, for instance, allows for an exploration of matter, Earth’s processes, classification, experimentation via the scientific method, and cycles, while heroism calls for writing, plot design, and archetype, as well as relationships to challenge.
Falcon uses an emergent curriculum, meaning that plans follow student needs and interests rather than the reverse. As such, our content evolves responsively, just as our classroom culture does, allowing us to keep it relevant and tailored to the group we have.
