Student Accomplishments:
PRS: “Learning Life Skills Through Remote Viewing”
From Heidi Smith of Phoenix Rising School (PRS):
“Challenge: how can we teach children the skills of focus, patience and perseverance in a way that is so fun and engaging they’ll want to practice on their own, especially when we as adults haven’t mastered them ourselves? Solution: arrange regular activities that are short, simple, and provide immediate feedback. Then include everyone, from the oldest staff member to the youngest student. This is the Phoenix Rising approach, and it’s getting remarkable results.
The number one tool our staff uses for practicing focus is remote viewing. The sessions are brief and are usually used as a warm-up activity or as segues into some other aspect of the curriculum. ‘All the classes do a remote view pretty much daily one way or another,’ says C.R.E.A.T.E™ Specialist Sonya El Debssi. ‘With the Pre-K you have an age appropriate remote view with pictures and movement, and sometimes we have music included. With the older classes we have numbers and dice and bingo wheels.’
Three-year-old students in Carol Shimono’s Early Explorers class focus on the letter of the week. ‘It’s pictures,’ says pre-K facilitator Nancy Driscoll. ‘This week is ‘d’, so it’s either a dog or a doughnut or a deer or some other ‘d’ word.’ In Early Childhood, the children do five remote views a day. Before they go to recess, they focus on finding a stuffed frog in a box on the playground. ‘They have a little map of the playground and they have to put their name on it where they say the frog is,’ says Nancy. ‘Today Ava and Talia both got it, out by the swing set.’ The class keeps track of everyone’s remote views on a large board in the classroom.
In the older grades, the classes remote view five rolls with a 20-sided dice several times a day. ‘The great thing is that the kids really like it and everybody’s getting numbers,’ says middle school science facilitator Jeevan Anandasakaran. ‘It’s good focus work because it’s fun at the same time,’ agrees Trajan, a student in the class.”
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Pyrenees Loertscher and Tahsis Fairley
– Heidi Smith of PRS continues:
Focus! Students See the Future Correctly
“A magic moment happened in Ms. Megan’s class this week. During a session of using iPads in a focus exercise designed to know the number and suit of cards in a deck before actually turning them over, Tahsis and Pyrenees were sharing an iPad with Ms. Megan. ‘When we got to the second card, I wrote down king of hearts,’ says Tahsis. ‘Pyrenees looked over, and he said, ‘Hey, I got the king of hearts too!’ We flipped it over and it was the king of hearts. We both got it without even looking at each other.’ For Megan, the experience was remarkable. ‘Seeing that, and seeing how many kids got the whole card correct was amazing,’ she says. ‘I have a math brain, so I’m very logical. Now I’m going home and saying to my parents, ‘This is happening.There’s something to this.’”
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