Skola Microschool

Our final summer session was built around the coolest theme ever: MN STATE FAIR!

Our students did crop art, built paper-mache ice cream cones, practiced fair-themed spelling words, did some math-on-a-stick, and dug into the genre of infographics.

Our summer sessions are full-day, week-long camps focused on Art, Nature, Habits, Friends and Fun. Our students are amazing and we’re so proud of their creativity!

It’s Skola night at Parkway Pizza!

“We ended well at The Bell”

We spent our final school day together at the Bell Museum. Our students are curious, respectful, and cheerful and they continue to amaze and inspire us.

Our Skola family is built on trust, and genuine care for creation and one another. This takes investment, patience, courage and time. Our students are invested in our community values just as much as their parents.

We walked 1.5 miles in pretty thick humidity and reached 500 school hours outside!! We took in a planetarium show and touched a narwhal tusk. We looked in microscopes and found small details in the dioramas, and found our old friend - the wooly mammoth.

Thanks for following along for our second school year. We’re so proud of our school and we’ve enjoyed the chance to let you peek inside. We’ll take a long break from posting and squeeze the most out of the summer ahead of us. Check back in again in the fall - we’d love to take you on round three!

Skola Microschool 2023-2024

Our oldest six students were tasked with designing and executing two consecutive field days. It was amazing and fun and heartfelt. Do you know how difficult it is to plan the games, find the equipment, design the schedule, and keep 25 students in the right frame of mind?!?! It’s a lot. And our oldest Skola crew absolutely rocked it, and gained so many skills and experience along the way. We’re incredibly proud of them.

We love redesigning and reimagining the school day. We’re proud to be leading the way.

As the year wraps up we’re in a bit of reflection mode and we can’t help but share our top 10 Gratitude list with you!

1- Rose Hill Alliance Church is so generous! It’s a magnificent spot, close to the city, and they help bring our vision of a redesigned school day to life!
2- We don’t buy anything that doesn’t have wheels or can’t be put on something with wheels. We’re so grateful for the generous donors who have supported our dream so we could purchase this functional equipment!
3- Pat Lyles is a kind and fantastic piano teacher, and she gives lessons right during the school day as part of our program. 15 of our 25 students learn under her all year long.
4- Parkway Pizza is super good, and super generous! They support local schools most days of the month. We’re so glad we can gather as a community and hang out while raising funds for new robots and cool tech!
5- Each January we spend two weeks with the incredible, kind, and ridiculously talented Jeremiah Gamble. He writes fresh poetry and teaches our students skills in stage presence and theatre.
6- A Skola school year is not complete without several trips to local libraries. We love getting out into the community and teaching students how to research, ask good questions, and be surrounded by rich resources. Let’s take Skola on the road! (Also thank you to our wheels!)
7- Unstructured play is key to a quality childhood, and is proven to increase attention, support executive functioning and boost physical and emotional health. We have several ponds with woodland and grassy fields and for that we are SO grateful.
8- Molly is a stellar art teacher. She knows how to tap into amazing projects to teach skills and creativity unlike any other teacher we know. She invites kids to really see themselves as artists, observers and creators. Our recent art show was just perfect and included sewn pizza stuffies and bubblegum self-portraits.
9- We call them the Raspberry Dads and they come faithfully every Wednesday to help kids build a code a Raspberry Pi robotics kit. They’re so patient and so wonderful to have around.
10- Steven Moore has captured photos of our students and we’re so grateful for eye in those personal moments

Skola is a special place and we give priority to paying attention to what students need. Our day is responsive, flexible and full of good routines. Habits are important and so is play. Friendships and collaboration are in balance with a personalized pace. Students need guidance and direction, paired with space and freedom to grow and learn.

We believe in multiage learning and giving students solid tools to build community. We believe kids want to participate (and even lead) in rich learning experiences. We believe getting hours outside everyday is part of a quality childhood. We believe the school day can be reimagined and redesigned. And we’re proud to be leading the way.

We finished a FULL day at the conservatory today. We visited our favorite Bonsai studio, enjoyed a Japanese garden, did some hands on learning with fern varieties and participated in visiting the highly anticipated Co**se Flower!

(The rare and unique Co**se Flower is set to bloom in the next few days and is known for its terrible stench. Bummer - we missed it!)

We’re giving students the tools to be observers, wonderers, adventurers, advocates, and question-askers. We love engaging with our community and supporting the amazing parks within our city.

It’s the school day reimagined and we’re proud to be leading the way.

We’re looking for a part-time instructor to join our Skola team. Application and Job Description links can be found here: https://bit.ly/WorkAtSkola

[email protected]
[email protected]

Skola Microschool is featured this week in Forbes!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerrymcdonald/2024/05/06/the-rise-of-education-entrepreneurs-in-minnesota/

When we started Skola in 2022 we had no idea of the adventure ahead of us, or the outsized impact of our small and mighty school.

We prioritize time outdoors both learning and playing. We believe kids want to be invested community members, and we believe in the power of healthy habits practiced consistently over time. We believe in academic sweet spots for students, working to create an environment that can respond to what they need. We believe in effective teachers and plan to do our part in building support, systems and innovation to keep good teachers in the game!

It’s the school day reimagined and we’re proud to be leading the way.

(Link in bio)

It is our JOY to design a school day that helps students connect with nature, creatures and neighbors.

We’ve built routines to help kids gain observation and conservation skills: slowing down to notice the beautiful spaces and creatures around us.

We track our hours outside every afternoon at our closing meeting. Our students take note of how the weather both changes and affects them, how the rain and the sun and the wind, and the newly hatching turtles, are all characters in our days together. We take time to honor a good, loving Creator.

We have under a month of school days together, and there’s a chance that we’ll clock 500 school hours outside! Our students are pumped, hopeful, and paying really close attention - knowing that this is a really big deal. Our students have grit because of this goal, and miles underneath their shoes. (Oh - and we have lots of ruined socks!)

We prioritize time outside because we know firsthand how healthy it is for humans of all ages. It’s the school day reimagined and we’re proud to be leading the way.

Student Led Projects are amazing, so sweet, highly creative - but yes, they’re usually messy, and take up a lot of time and space!

But these curiosity projects should ABSOLUTELY be a portion of the school day. If we want to prepare students for citizenship, the workplace, and fuel a love of learning, student-led curiosity projects have to hold space within our schedule somehow. As adults, we have to let go a bit of our over-structured, tight-gripped plans.

We have a few projects happening this week that we want to highlight here:

1) Two students are deep into an earthworm study, which has already lasted a week thanks to the lingering rain. They student are charting and measuring and coming up with some interesting hypothesis. (This project was generated out of our outdoor play times)

2) Our students LOVE the “Narwhal and Jelly” book series, so why not cut out some costumes and perform a skit?!

3) Older students are hard at work designing a field day for us later in the year. They’re making teams, designing maps and schedules and have already handed over a supply shopping list. ;)

It’s difficult to let go of adult-directed curriculum and teacher-led projects sometimes. We’ll be honest that our ideas tend to work better and include less mess. But here’s the beauty of it - play-inspired, kid-directed projects bring students to a place of learning and growth that we cannot match, and will absolutely prepare them for the future.

We still include adult directed instruction and projects in our school day - kids need guidance, good frameworks, and on-ramps to new ideas and concepts. But there is no match to the authenticity of learning when kids do the whole process themselves. Some of these student-directed projects will have no outcome, but the skills gained and content learned along the way are what every teacher dreams about - because IT MATTERS TO THEM and has real life applications.

Making space for both, and designing a day in balance is what excites us and gives us hope for the future of schooling!

It’s the school day reimagined. We’re proud to be leading the way.

Thanks to Parkway Pizza for just being AWESOME.

You’re invited to our monthly pizza gathering. All of the money raised goes to support our cool robotics workshop. Sounds good to us!

Today we celebrated Sophia with an 8th grade field trip. We have our first graduate this spring and we’ve curated a fun, thoughtful, and meaningful year. Sophia is amazing and she’s ready for the next season ahead of her. Here’s a peek into what we offer our 8th grade students:

- an opportunity to take a high school level math course (Sophia chose to take Algebra this year)
- publishing a book of personal essays (Sophia has a piece of writing for each letter of the alphabet!)
- three fun field trips surrounded by multi age classmates who love them, specially designed just to celebrate them (today included some MOA rides and a trip to a chocolate shop)
- science and history units that cover a wide scope of topics (Sophia crushed the periodic table unit)
- a chance to still rack up the hours outside (Sophia happens to be a favorite QB for Skola football)
- a chance to make those middle school years a time of deep growth and personal development

We will certainly miss Sophia, and it’s always bittersweet to say goodbye to a pillar of our community. We’re cheering you on SU - you have so much to offer the world!

How do we shape, train, and form students to be lifelong learners? Most of the time the answer to this is not linear or packaged neatly. If it was easy and clear, everyone would be doing it already.

Learning, like the really gritty kind of deep understanding and growing, takes time and happens within well-crafted environments. Learning appears through direct instruction, but also through play and practice.

At Skola, we care about teaching students healthy habits - that THEY can be in control of several pieces of their own learning environment. We put brain research into practice and we care about content-rich and skills-forward classrooms that fuel the fire inside each student.

“The demands of today’s world requires that the teaching methods of the past 2 centuries, such as memorization, be replaced with innovation, application, and transfer.” -Jerome Bruner

It’s the school day reimagined. We’re proud to be leading the way.

We love TEACHERS! And we’ve never been more proud than to be teachers today, finding renewed energy and passion for authentic teaching and learning. The future is bright when good, kind, and effective teachers stay in the game.

We started Skola in 2022 and since our opening we’ve hosted a dozen educators in our space. We love when teachers of all kinds come to visit and we’re so proud to show them the nuts and bolts of our day. Skola is a Model School for the microschooling movement.

(If you’re an educator and reading this - reach out! We’d love to give you your best PD experience to date)

Many of the teachers who connect with us continue right on ahead in their own classrooms, but with some hope, encouragement, and inspiration. A few of our visitors have started their own microschools and start doing the courageous work of building a school from the ground up.

We’re excited to share two of our friends with you: Rooted Learning Company (Rushford MN) and Wild Haven Microschool (Bloomington MN). We’re cheering you on!

Our week was filled with earthworm colonies, practicing measurement and ratios, scratch coding and course building, helping friends, apologies and forgiveness, and reading some really great books.

When we set out to build our dream school we knew it wasn’t going to be easy but we could stick to some clear values and goals:

🍃 1) Let’s get students outside as much as we can! Skola is a part of a movement that believes in the cognitive, physical, and holistic benefits of more play, especially outdoors.

💙 2) Strong communities are not accidental. We intentionally teach our students how to navigate conflict, see creatures and neighbors, and be invested as friends and classmates.

🧠 3) Academic “sweet spots” happen when readiness meets the right challenge. We work hard to create learning environments that encourage our students to take charge, to show grit, to grow more curious and courageous. We aim to meet students where they’re at, and in turn they’ll love the process of learning more than any shallow outcome.

At Skola we put research into action. It’s the school day reimagined and we’re proud to be leading the way.

Small habits, done consistently over time make the biggest difference.

At Skola we design a day that is vibrant and playful while honoring the importance and effectiveness of strong habits.

- Almost every day at closing huddle, we spend 5 minutes sharing what we appreciate about our classmates. That adds up to hours focused on the good of our community and the investment of relationships.

-Almost everyday we spend 160-200 minutes outdoors in all types of weather. Over time this adds up to an appreciation of seasons and a connection to nature.

-Almost every day our students have 30-40 uninterrupted minutes to read. Over time this adds up to strong background knowledge, and readers of all abilities who simply enjoy books and the joy found in all sorts of genres.

-Almost every day our students clean up and do chores. Over time this helps them take better care of our supplies and feel in charge of their own environments.

Our habits are a big deal. The small things we give time and attention to add up. Microschools have the unique ability to be intentional about building strong habits. Our students are able to see their own growth over a school year, and feel the fruit of “small things” done well over time.

It’s the school day reimagined and we’re proud to be leading the way.

There’s a delicate balance between teaching students HOW to learn and WHAT to learn. If we’re preparing students for a rapidly-changing world, their schooling experience requires both.

Students need skills-forward classrooms. They also deserve content-rich classrooms. At Skola, we’re staying small so that we can design a school day filled with healthy routines, vibrant play, academic “sweet spots,” and plenty of minutes outside.

It’s the school day reimagined and we’re proud to be leading the way.

Wanna join us tomorrow for pizza and community?

(Online and take-out orders count too!)

We live that our ongoing fundraiser includes a chance to grow closer together over a meal and fun local fare. Thank you for your generous support of local schools.

😎Finks will be there near 5pm if you need a familiar face.

It’s MINNESOTA week at Skola, complete with its own crazy spring snow storm.

We covered state symbols, geography, history, and government: Prince, Honeycrisp, The Edmund Fitzgerald, our new flag, Aurora Borealis, and mosquitoes. From the Dakota, Ojibwe-Anishinabe, French fur traders, Hmong, Somali, Irish and Scandinavians… the list goes on!

We take advantage of our multi-age classroom and set apart 18days during the school year to focus on a large group theme. We bring in experts and guest speakers and focus on a particular topic or skill. We call these our “J term” days and this week was quite the hit!

A highlight (besides the fresh sticky snow) was hosting Author Patricia Bauer and Illustrator David Geister, along with a fun hammer and nails workshop.

Our week was packed with rich learning, a chance to visit the MN History Museum, and of course rack up some more minutes outside.

Deep learning comes primarily through three modes: direct instruction, habits or practice, and experiences. We love creating a week where all three work in harmony and balance.

(If you have a chance to see the Charles Schulz exhibit at the MN History museum - please go! It was a major hit for our multi-age learners.)

Skola students spotted in the wild.

Our week was filled with Latin roots, division, a deep dive into birds, new math games, vocabulary, letter blends, and beautiful days to work outdoors!

We believe in helping students become lifelong learners. This includes learning how to be connected to nature, and grounded in healthy social skills.

We ABSOLUTELY want our students to be readers, communicators, problem solvers, leaders and critical thinkers - FOR LIFE. We’re a school model that works hard to set them up for success.

Part of setting our students up for success is helping them become LIFELONG nature caretakers, and grow into adults who spend time outdoors as part of their daily lives. Just like we prepare our students to be literate in core subjects, we prepare them to be literate in time spent outdoors.

It’s a healthy and happy school day. We’re proud to be leading the way.

You’re invited to our monthly gathering at Parkway Pizza!

Maybe you come for the pizza…maybe for the socializing - either way works for us. (Online and takeout orders count too!)

Because of the generous support of Roseville Parkway, and the way our community shows up BIG - we’ve been able to purchase great tools for our robotics and computer programming workshop. THANK YOU!

Student learning starts with connection.

We’re a K-8 Microschool in Roseville Minnesota. We work hard to personalize the learning experience and make sure we get outside a lot. We’re intentional about meeting students where they’re at, while also giving the time and tools to help them invest in community and friendships. Learning happens within relationships. We love leading the way.

Our week was filled with book clubs, measuring/calculating and drawing circles, learning about ancient African cultures, spelling practice, and enjoying a February spring.

A typical day usually includes a version of this rhythm:
- morning outdoor play
- opening meeting
- time to read
- small group learning
- individual practice
- lunch
- outside (older students have additional class)
- hike to a park
- return to read
- closing meeting
- afternoon workshop

We fill our days with content-rich and skills-forward practices. We help our students establish healthy friendships, and we take time to build culture and give them tools for that purpose. Our goal is to personalize learning, which means structuring a day that can respond to what students need but also stretch them and challenge them. Healthy and happy schools are possible. We’re proud to be leading the way.

It’s the school day reimagined.

Our week was filled with divisibility and exponent rules, creative theme Valentine boxes, book club groups, Robert Frost, bubblegum self portraits, a chapel service focused on “Justice,” and the most amazing sunny snow day!

Our dream, and now our commitment, is to design a school day that follows research, and keeps in mind what we all know to be true and good for kids. We use the benefits of multi-age learning. We establish strong and predictable rhythms so kids feel peaceful in a community, and confident to take risks. We prioritize time outdoors and we give kids the tools to help them focus deeply, and invest in deep friendships.

It’s the school day reimagined and we’re proud to be leading the way.

Reading Goals.

This week was filled with sunshine, a sweet lunch out with our oldest students, presentations on the preamble, more sunshine, wiring up an LED project (we’ll learn to code it next class), more sunshine, nature journaling and celebrating birthdays and friends. Did we mention the amazing amount of sunshine?!?! ☀️ We reached over 200 hours of outdoor learning and play this week, and we cannot be more convinced of the health and academic benefits of prioritizing time outside.

We're an innovative K-8 Microschool and we chose to stay small so that we can restructure the school day to match research and what we all know to be good for kids and young teens.

We ebb and flow with the seasons. We believe in the power of play. We give our students the tools to be active community contributors. We practice caring for creatures and the neighborhood around us.

It’s the school day reimagined.