A lot of parents want to know: "How do you choose your topics? Do you choose them? Do the children choose them?" Well, in my experience, when a child is interested in something they're gonna buy into learning about it. They're gonna wanna know more. They're already interested in it. So they're going to take ownership of that topic because they've chosen it. And this is something that happens in pod.

So the way it works is kids come up with a million topics that they would like to know about. We write them down on a whiteboard. We'll take anything that they say and then we'll kind of sift through it and say, "Could we really learn about dragons? Is that something that's scientific or cultural that we really want to learn about . . . that we should learn about?" And then we kind of cross it off because it's a fictional topic. So something like dragons or mermaids is not gonna happen. Video games . . . not gonna happen. We strive for scientific topics, we strive for cultural topics like countries around the world.

And so once they get the idea that we're studying things that are interesting to us but are relevant in every day, then they narrow their topics down. And I can give you some names of topics that we've studied this year. We've done birds, which includes chickens. We actually had 12 eggs that we hatched from eggs from Casey Farm. So we learned about birds and the life cycle of birds. One of our topics is pollinators. So that included butterflies, and we ordered live butterflies and studied the life cycle, and compared them to moths and other pollinators such as wasps and bees and hummingbirds. We also did ocean animals, Arctic animals, dinosaurs. Pets is now our current topic at the very end of our year. We're learning about pets and we're actually having some pets come into our classroom.

Other topics have included the 50 states, where we actually went to the State House for a field trip. We did Egypt, and we actually went to the RISD Museum and saw the Egyptian exhibit there, which was fantastic. We did endangered animals, which was really relevant and poignant because we didn't realize so many animals were vulnerable or endangered. So we went to the Roger Williams Zoo and found that most of the animals there that we were looking at were vulnerable or endangered. We did countries such as Egypt, Mexico, and India. So Children came up with these topics.

So how it works is they, we write a list of relevant, important topics that would be suitable to study. Then the Children write... (This is the older pod I'm talking about.) The children write a persuasive text using a topic sentence, three supporting details, and a concluding sentence on why they think that topic should be learned. So they'd stand up on a chair and they explain to everybody from what they've written why they think that should be our next topic, and then we vote on it. We have a secret vote and everyone gets to vote for two things and it kind of creates a, a list of things that we really see we really want to learn about. And so maybe the first topic with the most votes is what we do. And then the second topic is what we would do next. So it comes from the kids and because they've chosen it, they buy into the learning. In the littler pod, they might draw a picture of what they think would be a cool topic to do. We make a list the same way, but they might draw a picture and try to convince everybody just verbally. "I think we should do this topic because..." and then we vote by drawing a picture. So it comes from the students in the same way.

Teachable moments might occur to you if you're homeschooling. It's the same thing in pod, but on a grander scale. If we discover if we look out the window and see the ocean: "Let's study the ocean." If we see that there's a lot of bees and hummingbirds and wasps flying around, maybe that would be a good topic to study next. So we use our natural interest to choose our next topic.