This week, dive into the concept of "sneaky learning" with us, a term coined by EXPLO parents, Anna and Graeme Lawrie, which gets to the heart of EXPLO's curriculum, both inside and outside of the classroom.
Sneaky learning is more than just having fun; it’s also how we believe we can prepare kids for an uncertain future. When we put learning in disguise, our brains are more open to the unexpected, which fosters students’ innate creativity to push past their boundaries. When a student says they may have "accidentally" learned something, it’s usually the result of carefully curated content — and we consider it no accident at all.
If [students] are building bridges and also destroying them, you can apply so much educational theory to that. And that’s what [EXPLO’s] team does. They are really cleverly pulling [fun and academic rigor] together. I mean, we recently spent 10 minutes in an EXPLO class… and we didn’t want to leave.
At EXPLO, we encourage the pursuit of lifelong learning — which means we are constantly doing our own studying up, reading on, or relearning the concepts that we teach throughout the summer. Here are some fun links that we've been recently reading on sneaky learning.
Hands-On = Minds On. Why playful learning is the key to prosperity.
The combination of serendipity and sagacity offers a powerful lesson in the classroom: sometimes digression is education
This author took up a sport for fun. No surprise that it led him to write a critically-acclaimed book about the Athenian Navy and the evolution of the Viking longship.
At EXPLO, sneaky learning takes many shapes, forms, exercises, and events. Just a few EXPLO experiences students have tried that include hidden ways of learning are: