Double Creek School: October 2019

This post was written by a very special guest blogger, 4th grade student, E., in May 2019. We hope you enjoy reading her perspective on being a student at Double Creek.

Double Creek school is a place where students learn at their own pace. At this school, teachers work to understand the level and needs of each student. This small private school is a great opportunity for kids to do many things that other schools do not provide. Here, we make sure that each child is comfortable with the learning. We also provide a green space area behind our school for recess and exploration. In this group, we welcome all kids and we make sure that they feel safe and at home.

The property of this school has a very interesting history. The house that we use as a school dates back to more than a hundred years ago (though, or course, we remodeled it and made it safe). This property used to be a horse track where races were held, but over time, the track was made into a natural place with a trail.

Our school property includes huge, green lawns for kids to play sports on, and a forest behind our lawns. Our rich, natural forest is filled with native plants, fir, pines, and oaks, trails, and creeks safe and fun for students to both play and explore in. It gives our school a rare chance to live next to nature, and we see many animals such as raccoons. We also have had many encounters with owls asleep or awake (including our mascot, the barred owl). This year, we also have a hummingbird feeder that is visited many times every day, and our students have made bird houses; one of which is now occupied by a family of black-capped chickadees with four chicklings and an unhatched egg.

We also have a garden that the students planted this year. Our garden has a variety of vegetables and flowers. For a side science, we are recording the data of our plants.

At Double Creek students work at their own pace, and teachers have many different curriculum and projects for kids to work on in math and literature. We also have history, science, and art classes. This year in science, we have studied scientific chemicals (like CO2 and HO2), genetics, biology, and many other subjects in the older grades. In history, we study the United States and how Oregon began.

Inside, we provide a warm and cozy place to study in. Upstairs, we have a kitchen that provides many things needed to make or store lunches in, such as two sinks, a stove, refrigerator, oven, dishwasher, and microwave. Next to it, we have a living room with comfy chairs and sofas to relax in. We also have two classrooms. One, made for students from older grades and the other for younger. They were both made to help kids focus on their work, but feel relaxed and comfortable at the same time.

During math and literature, we have a break time where teachers often cut up a healthy snack of apples, oranges, cucumbers, and sometimes celery and tomatoes.

Upstairs, we have a mini-library, although we have a much larger one downstairs. It mostly contains non-fiction books needed in classes, although we do keep some popular ones that the students especially love in this library.

Downstairs, we have a playroom to play in during rainy days when the outside is not possible. In this room, we have a bean bag and a king-size mattress that the kids love to jump on. We provide toys like LEGO, balls, hula hoops, and many others that keep kids entertained on rainy days.

Our library downstairs is combined with the playroom, and includes a large selection of books to select from. We have many fiction books that were once used in OBOB, classic books, bestselling series, and Newberry Honor books. In our non-fiction part of the library, we include biographies, guide books, biology books, and books about inventions as well as many others.

The higher and lower class both goes to fun field trips together that are related to the subjects we are studying. So far, we have went to Bonneville Dam to see salmon, Astoria, Oregon City, Woodburn and Fort Vancouver.

We hope that you will come to visit the Double Creek school and find it warm and welcoming as well as finding an academic school fit for your child. Please find a time to visit us and our school!

Our school year is off to a great start! The boots are out and the critters in the stream are getting a lot of attention.

September is the time for getting to know each other and figuring out learning goals for each of our students. We also made the most of the fall weather by taking a few field trips. We went to Truck Day in Beaverton to meet some community helpers and checked out their vehicles.

Oregon Heritage Farms showed us their apple processing facility, gave us a hayride and let us try their apple cider. The trip concluded with plenty of bouncing in the giant inflatable apple.

The school dogs, Misty and Kiwi, have been hard at work joining in circle time, collecting scratches, cleaning up crumbs and keeping the couch warm. Mia, the poodle, even came to help out for a week.