Project To-Do Guide | Portals Academy

Project Idea Guide for Portals Planning

Active: Physical Education: This integrates physical and cardiovascular activity and develops lifetime habits of activity and health. Seasonal sports, hobbies, and outdoor activities that use the body to extend learning, build lifetime hobbies, or to have fun.

Bible: [THINK SECTION] Spiritual Life: All classes are God’s classes, all subjects and all Truth is God’s alone. Are there connections to key Bible passages that are worth pointing out? Help students make connections to God’s Word whenever appropriate for the lesson.

Build/Craft: Tech/engineering: To explore and build working items. If they read about it, they can build it! Use of tools and varied mediums for creation including models, digital simulations, replicas, dioramas, etc. As these may include tools that need supervision, add safety comments and “for older learners” when needed.

Cook/Bake: Home Education: Tasting a subject helps to experience it too. Cooking, baking, grilling, and preparing food builds a household skill and emphasizes healthy options (when possible). Include links to recipes and safety disclaimers.

Create: Art Ed: Exposure, artists/history (if applicable), and hands-on art projects using a variety of mediums. This includes painting, drawing, sculpting, etc. Across mediums both tactile and digital models, posters, etc.

Disciplines: Spiritual Life: Different people and Christian traditions have sought God in a variety of ways. Biblically, we have at our disposal spiritual disciplines that should be cultivated as much or more than book learning! This includes prayer, meditation, fasting, Bible study, blessing others (ministry above), celebration, discipleship, worship, using reason, and creating order. Take care to condition these ideas to respect family practice and faith traditions.

Experiment/Lab: Scientific Method: Practice Scientific Method observation, hypothesis, test, and conclusions. Each should build on curiosity, inquiry, and following through on interest. Recording experiments can include charts, graphs, tables, and write ups.

Field Trip: Socialization/Wisdom: For content appropriate opportunities, these need to be suggestions typically as they are dependent on geography, time, and parent access to experiences outside the day-to-day setting. Suggest for Friday if a longer experience. If popular locally, these can also be coordinated outings for all of Portals.

Interview: Socialization/Wisdom: Talking to a knowledgeable adult on a topic. We want young people to pursue conversations with elders and grow to appreciate wisdom from them. Their passion is the best engagement possible! Attend to new vocabulary, recording, writing, and repeating interviews for more practice in communication.

Maps/Charts/Graphs: Scientific Method: Build familiarity with and competence in reading visualized information across subject areas. Also an opportunity to practice data collection, organization, and communication skills when created and shared with others.

Ministry: Leadership: Use appropriate opportunities to take any of the above actions to serve, give, help, or be a blessing to anyone inside or outside of the family, church, community. How can our work be of service to others. When it fits with content topics, these can be distinctive of Portals design and mission.

Music: Music Ed: Exposure, artists/history (if applicable), and experiencing music across history, cultures, and time. Also, experience with making and producing audio creations, memorization, and aesthetic appreciation.

Play: Systemic Thinking: Most workplaces today require the knowledge of a system, not a set of facts. Games help develop thinking about how systems work. Live action (sport), tabletop, or computer games are to have systems that encourage strategy construction or reenactment of interactions or complex systems in a fun and playful way. (A quiz is NOT a game). This includes simulations, strategy, or challenges that allow learners to fail forward, try again, gain expertise, and even teach/coach others. This may also include creating a game.

Programming/Computer Use: Building 21st century skills includes programming. Software like Scratch has a wide variety of project applications (movie, video, game design); and builders like Minecraft can be used for digital design and construction of physical models (digestive system, Taj Mahal, or even simple computers); office suite software literacy requires using tools for word processing, spreadsheets, and slides.

Write: Communication: Experience and practice communicating in writing, via multiple genres, forms, and contexts. Writing includes vocabulary, parts of speech, poetry, story, slideshows, movies, speeches, reviews, articles, etc. Expect this will be more common in Language Arts, but welcomed in other areas too.