Project Based Learning

The Onion River School AND Project Based Learning

At ORS, we believe deeply in the power of authentic, meaningful and engaging curriculum.  As such, the curriculum our students will engage in will provide real-world applications, opportunities for creative discovery,  and honor a student's past and present achievements and allow for future growth.

Below, you will find a summary the projects we will engage with.

Spring 2024 - English

Changing the World One Poem at a Time

Project Summary

In this project, students create visual presentations of social justice poetry. Each student chooses a social justice poem and analyzes the elements of content and craft that make it powerful and effective. Students find or create accompanying images that enhance their selected poem’s meaning and record an expressive oral performance of the poem. 

Teams collaborate to storyboard and produce a montage video that ties the poems together around a common theme. Students also create a response poem or social justice poem of their own inspired by one of their classmates’ selected poems. Finally, students work together as a class to create a community exhibition featuring their video montages as well as their original poems paired with images and the mentor texts that inspired them.

Spring 2024 - Science

Green House

Project Summary

Building on the successes from Semester 1, ORS students will begin working inside the greenhouse as they dive in to soil and plant science.  Digging deeper into the necessary elements of effective soil, students will learn about biogeochemical cycles, soil pH, and how critters can positively, and negatively, impact the delicate balance of properly growing plants and vegetables.  Additionally, students will follow a plant from seed to germination to better understand the vital processes and how best to support healthy growth and reproduction of our favorite plants.

Fall 2023 - English

Fall 2023 - Science

Green House 

Project Summary

In this project, students learn about the current climate crisis and the availability, or lack of, access to high quality food sources. Students explore local farms, nurseries, and orchards to glean a better understanding of the what is needed to produce food in a Northern Climate. They use this information, along with key skills related to measurement and geometry, to create prototypes of custom greenhouses and eventually construct a working one. Students also read about sustainability, how greenhouses work, and climate change over time, and apply what they learn from their reading to their final presentations.

The Many Functions of Walking

Project Summary

Students work together to plan a walk-a-thon in order to raise money for a cause or event that is important to their community. (As an alternative, you might consider having students partner with a walk-a-thon that is already happening.) Examples may include, but are not limited to, hurricane relief, cancer research, a school dance, or an eighth grade graduation event. 

While planning the walk-a-thon, each team of students engages in a series of activities that require them to use functions to model different types of sponsorships, predicted times based on walking rates, and per-person costs for running the event. Students create and maintain a blog as a method of advertising, soliciting sponsors, and explaining their work with functions to the community.

Game Time

Project Summary

In this project, students work together to create a video game that incorporates geometric concepts of transformations. Student teams develop game concepts and divide their game world into individual sections or levels, each to be programmed by a different team member. Students learn to write algebraic relationships that represent different transformations and use these relationships and programming tools such as MIT's Scratch to program their game. Games should incorporate multiple types of polygons and non-polygons and different types of transformations, including translations, rotations, and reflections. Students engage in critique and revision during user testing cycles with peers or video game fans. Students must accurately use key mathematics vocabulary to produce a written manual for their game, explaining the game’s concept, structure, and how the transformations are used within the game.

Alien Creatures 

Project Summary

Sci-fi films often include planets that have biomes similar to Earth and show alien animals that represent different levels of the food chain. In many cases, these creatures are not well adapted to their environment or their place in the food chain. In this project, students design appropriately adapted alien animals for design studios or filmmakers to use in future sci-fi films.

Student teams learn about biomes of Earth, animal adaptations, food chains, food webs, and how genes in DNA give rise to traits through protein synthesis. Each team chooses one biome, and each team member creates an alien animal that represents one role in the food chain (herbivore, predator, apex predator, scavenger). Students consider how their creatures are adapted for survival in the physical environment and explore the food chain relationships between the team’s creatures. Then, using what they learned about protein synthesis, students identify the genes in their alien animals that inform the creature’s appearance.

Students contact filmmakers and design firms to share their work, providing links to their alien animal design website. Then, students showcase their designs in a gallery-like setting with invited guests.