Brightworks Blog

Brightworks is a flurry of activity and we are thrilled to share peeks into the lives of the students, our school and the community.

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While we are out on summer break our buildings are still a hive of activities! @tinkeringschool is already in full session and they will keep it going with their summer classes through August 8th! While these teasers cover the Big Builds they are pl
Let's celebrate our 8th grade graduates this year! While all of our learners got a heartfelt recognition for all their accomplishments and contributions at our last day of school, we do want to especially celebrate our 8th grade graduates! Some o
We kicked off Pride Month by inviting Drag Queen, storyteller and author Lil Miss Hot Mess, @lilmisshotmess to read from her own work! And our kids loved it! Take a peak at these cute snippets and see what this playful and imaginary approach can do
We love to see our middle schoolers providing support to our elementary students in a joint effort to share about their current project work! And we are very excited to see these kind of cross age interactions being so beneficial to all participants!
What is happening around Gever's desk? Take a look at these snippets and imagine the rich culture of learning we work to cultivate on a daily basis! At the heart of our teaching philosophy is the belief that developing students' agency is vital t
When our Middle Schoolers go camping they always return with an epic experience! This time they visited Sugarloaf Ridge State Park and The Robert Ferguson Observatory for some night time star gazing, studies of native & indigenous plants, memor
This majestic visitor was spotted right in our parking lot this afternoon— a reminder that at Brightworks, nature isn’t a field trip, it’s our everyday backdrop. Nestled in the heart of the Presidio, Brightworks students explore tr
Piper Alldredge Piper Alldredge

Orange Band: Seed, Week 10

Seed Arc is  flying by; before we know it, we'll be onto Human. But first, we need to wrap up these projects, and present to our community. This week, we made a lot of progress on our planter boxes and plant play, here are some highlights!Potato cuttings work so well for our planter boxes! The flat face of the potato sits right up against the plexi-glass.So much great teamwork went into making costumes for our plant play. There are so many things in sewing that really need 2 pairs of hands, so here Gita helps measure Oscar for his spider legs.When we got to the community garden on Wednesday, we discover a container with several baby lettuce plants waiting to be planted. Here, Nathan helps Sadie carefully plant the lettuce without breaking up the roots too much.After trying to water out potato cuttings, we discovered that our planter boxes leak--a lot. So, we spent some time on Thursday troubleshooting solutions. We landed on the idea of stuffing strips of sponges to fill the gap between the plexi-glass and the wood.Oscar stuck with this problem all day. When we discovered that the sponges worked, but not quite well enough, we brought out the big guns--the big caulk guns that is.Oscar's mom, Nora, is a great seamstress and came in to help us sew our costumes Friday morning! We made so much progress with her help, thank you Nora!This week, Sadie drew the pattern for her feathers, cut them out, sewed them together with help from Isaac, and then hand-stitched on the elastic bands to hold her wings in place at her wrist and shoulder. Talk about being thorough!

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