It’s Friday at The Gregory School. Ten middle school students work with a University of Arizona biologist and her graduate students to catch, measure, and band birds on our campus. A van full of upper schoolers arrives at TMC for Seniors to help senior citizens use their technology. A sophomore directs a multi-age group making a short narrative film about two friends, one of whom is moving away. These are but three of the thousands of Friday Explorations that we have offered to our students since creating the program, a unique experiment in experiential learning, in 2015.
Every Friday that is part of a regular five-day school week is devoted to Friday Explorations. All students in grades 5 - 12 work with their advisors to select, from a huge variety of options, four special Friday classes that are not part of their regular weekly school schedule.
These classes, called Explorations, may be related to something a student is already studying—for example, Mandarin students may have the option of playing Chinese games in Mandarin—or something entirely different, such as working in a team to design a water filtration system for the farmyard duck pond.
