Elm Creek School’s (ECS) students are STRIVEing for excellence.
On May 30, ECS held their annual STRIVE Expo, where students in the STRIVE program showed the community what they’ve been working on all year. The STRIVE program (Self-Taught Real-World Independent Valuable Experience) has students choose something of particular interest to them, find a high school curriculum that matches that interest, and spend the year looking at that curriculum’s outcomes and working to meet them. At the end of the year, students present their projects to a panel of judges and receive grades based on how well they met the curriculum’s deliverables. Then, they set up in the gym science fair style and present their project to the community.
“High school students feel a lack of relevancy in courses so this gives them the opportunity to pick something they’re likely going to do already, spend personal time on, and connect with, and earn a high school credit for it,” said Robyn Woytowich, who oversees the STRIVE program. “It helps them also learn the responsibility of holding themselves accountable and makes them more independent.”
Woytowich added that the STRIVE program is an excellent way to help high school students prepare for post-secondary school, where much of the work is self-fueled.
Scarlett Friesen, a Grade 10 student at ECS, participated in the STRIVE program for the second time this year, using her personal business as the basis. Friesen’s business, Playfully Fobulous, offers fabric key fobs she makes herself. She wanted to use the STRIVE program to grow the business and used the credit she would get as motivation.
Friesen’s curriculum was business-based, with the main outcomes being she learned employability skills, how to run a successful business, and how to cater to different kinds of people. Friesen went to vendor markets to reach these deliverables, where she would sell her goods and talk to other vendors to learn more about how they run their businesses. Last year, Friesen did great, but this year she did better, getting 100 per cent on her final presentation.
Jacy Butler, a Grade 9 student at ECS, participated in the STRIVE program for the first time this year. For her project, she chose to learn guitar. Butler enjoys learning and playing piano, and she’d wanted to learn guitar for a while, so the STRIVE program was the perfect reason.
Butler saved up her work money and bought herself an electric guitar. Because she couldn’t play it in the classroom during the allotted time for the program, Butler worked on other things and taught herself guitar in her free time. In her basement, she’d spend time on YouTube learning chords, songs, and tabs, and now, she knows 10 chords and can play a few songs all the way through.
While the students work on their projects throughout the year, they also have to create a website that showcases the project and gives updates on their progress. Their final presentations include backdrops and PowerPoints the students must also create.
This year, ECS’s STRIVE program had 20 students. Woytowich said the bulk of the students were in Grade 9, and she was extremely impressed with everyone’s presentations.
“We were, as judges, blown away by a lot of them,” she said.
