In this episode of The Sage Studio Podcast, we have a special update from Kiley Duncan about the exciting developments at Sage Oak and the Oakschool program. Kiley shares her enthusiasm for the incredible opportunity offered to the Sage Oak families.
One of the highlights is the integration of curriculum into Oakschool's core classes, which include math, reading, writing, history, and science. The school has purchased curriculum using a grant and will provide it for free to students enrolling in a full year of Oakschool classes. This curriculum includes Beast Academy Math, Singapore Math, History Alive, Generation Genius, and a novel writing program.
Oakschool also offers a wide range of enrichment classes in subjects like Spanish, sign language, cooking, coding, adventure novel writing, and ukulele. The school focuses on foreign language, technology, and the arts to bring students together to collaborate, socialize, and be enriched.
Enrollment for Oakschool is now open, and families are encouraged to visit the website at https://www.sageoak.education/oakschool/ for the catalog and detailed class descriptions. The website also provides filtering options by subject area, grade level, and quarter, making it easier for families to plan their schedules.
Kiley, who has been with Sage Oak for 8 years and is now the Assistant Principal for the Personalized Learning Academy, is excited about the growth and success of the program. She actively seeks feedback from parents and teachers to improve the program and will continue to seek parent feedback and suggestions for the upcoming school year.
Furthermore, Oakschool is expanding its program to more locations in quarter one and quarter four, with a focus on areas with high student populations. They have also hired new art teachers to offer free live art instruction in regional locations. Additionally, paid live instruction is available for TK through eighth-grade students, with a variety of classes to choose from.
If you would like to learn more about the amazing opportunities and classes at Oakschool, visit www.sageoak.education today. Don't miss out on this enriching experience for your child!
Visit https://www.sageoak.education/oakschool/ to explore the Oakschool catalog, enroll in classes, and discover the exciting opportunities available for your child. Don't delay, secure your spot now and join the Sage Oak family!
Thank you for listening to the Sage Studio podcast presented by Sage Oak Charter Schools and hosted by Tiffiny Webster, M.A.Ed. We invite you to follow the show and leave your review below. Sage Oak Charter Schools is an independent study nonclassroom based TK-12 personalized learning public charter school serving students in Southern California. Visit sageoak.education for more information.
Well, welcome to another episode of Sage Studio. I'm Tiffiny Webster, and today I am joined with Kiley Duncan, and I am so excited to bring Kiley on the podcast today because she's gonna be talking to us about Oakschool, all the new things that are happening with Oakschool, which I know our families love. So Kiley, welcome to the podcast. Thank so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Always good to talk to you. Now for our new families that may not know you, or for our returning families that may not know about your new position, tell us a little bit about what you do here to support teachers and families at say Oak. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going into my eighth year at Sage Oak. I began as a teacher and then moved into a regional mentor position. Then evolved into a lead coordinator position. And then this year I'll be starting my role as the Assistant Principal for our personalized learning academy. And with that role, I will still be kind of overarching Oakschool as the primary coordinator for our Oakschool program. So I'm really looking forward to that role. My whole heart is in Oakschool. It's a labor of love every single year and we're, we're launching our second year, which I'm very excited about. All these new things that we have that we worked on over summer and the different things that we're able to bring to our families for the 2324 school year. So exciting. I know that our families are loving Oakschool as well. So tell us a little bit, first of all, what is Oakschool and what can we expect this year? Oakschool, Is paid live instruction where students would utilize their instructional funds to purchase enrollment for a class just like they would with any local community provider. and it's for our TK through eighth grade students. And what's amazing is we do these on a quarterly basis. And every single quarter we offer anywhere from 60 to 70 different classes for all of our different grade levels. And it ranges from core subjects to special interests we can tap into any interest that a student has. Most of our classes are once per week for an hour, and you'll do like an eight week session and then re-enroll. We do have a couple of middle school math classes that are twice a week, but for the most part it's gonna be once a week for an hour, Something new. And it's kind of, it's, it's up and coming. It has not been released yet. In addition to this, we did hire two brand new art teachers this year. And so the amazing thing is I am in the works with them to design a bunch of classes. They'll be teaching and they will be offering free live instruction. What's really neat with our, our art classes this year is they will be held in the afternoons and these will be free to TK through high school students. Wow. Which is pretty amazing. So we do have some coming that will be at no cost to our Sage Oak student. I love that. Okay, good. So the catalog keeps growing. That's an exciting thing. Okay, so let's first talk about some of the the fun enrichment types of classes that Oakschool offers. Oh my goodness, there's so many. We do anything from Spanish classes to sign language classes, to cooking, to coding adventure, novel writing ukulele. I, I mean the list like goes on and on. We really try to tap into foreign language technology, the arts. Music while bringing some of the, the core aspect to it as well. the heartbeat behind Oakschool is bringing students together to collaborate, to socialize, to be enriched, and for that teacher to just keep them engaged for that hour. And, and oftentimes they do build such great connections that they enroll for one quarter and they're back for the next quarter to see that same teacher. Those same groups of students as well. So, we have so many different types of classes and, on our website, you can look through our catalog and it's a beautiful catalog. It's got different images and detailed descriptions and when I look through it, I get excited where I'm thinking, I wish I could take all of these classes. So I'm very excited to see what our teachers have in store with instruction this year okay, so talk to me now about some of the new core classes that we're offering. This is exciting. And explain a little bit to our families. How is a core class different than an enrichment class? Yeah, so a core class, what that basically is, is we're taking one of our select curriculum. So when you look at our website, and it's a curriculum we might want you to utilize for math or for reading, or for writing or history or science, and. What we've done is we've embedded that within one of our Oakschool classes, so that if you were to purchase that curriculum, you have a teacher teaching right alongside your child once or twice a week. So that maybe the burden of the instruction for the parent doesn't always fall on them, but they have another teacher that the student can be meeting with. Something really neat this year that we did not have last year. Is we did, we were provided with a grant to use toward curriculum this summer. So we end up purchasing a lot of this curriculum on our own. And what we're gonna do to give back to our Sage Oak students is if you enroll for an entire year of Oakschool. So let's say you enroll one of our Singapore math classes, we will include that curriculum for free, which a lot of times on its own, it's a couple hundred dollars and the only cost that would come out of the child's fund. Is the shipping. And so I think that's something really neat that we're bringing to families where not only do you enroll in this class and have this teacher that can be instructing you, but we will include that curriculum and for those classes, We have for our first through third graders, we're utilizing Beast Academy Math. And then for our fourth through eighth graders, we are utilizing our Singapore math for our middle school history, we're utilizing History Alive for our middle school science. We're using Generation Genius, and then we have this brand new writing program. And it's basically 180 days to write a novel. And by the end of the year you can actually get your novel published and order it on Amazon. And other people can order the book as well. You can actually become a publisher and that's one of our writing curriculum. So we've really opened the door on a lot of these core classes where if you're a student at Sage Oak you have to have these curriculums. And now we're embedding that. In Oakschool so that you, the parents have support there as well as teachers. So we're very excited for that. Wow. I can see why that is an incredible opportunity full of benefits for our Sage Oak family. So that is so exciting. I cannot wait to hear how our families respond to that. I think that's going to be wildly popular. So that's really, yeah, that's a great option and such a fun thing for them to get to, to try. And you know, I love that one of the things that you continue to lead our teachers to do with this Oakschool program is just to continue to innovate. And I know that's one of our Sage Oak core values. And so always innovating and thinking about how can we change it up? How can we make it different? How can we make it better? How can we provide different offerings? It's really great to see that all of that innovation and growth is continuing to happen in this program. So, So exciting. Yeah, and we really, we really do try to get feedback from parents. So, last year I sent out surveys like, what would you wanna see coming for the next school year? Do you have any suggestions? And I do the same thing for, for teachers. So I really do pay attention to all the feedback I get. So I can try to improve the program and keep bringing new classes that students are interested so that you can actually get to meet other students at our school and develop those relationships as well. Now, one of the things I know you tried last year was live PE classes. How did that go over? Are you planning on bringing back some more live PE classes? So we did trial it at the end of quarter four, and that was just in our Temecula region and it went really well. We've got so, so much positive response that we decided to bring it back to more locations this year, so for quarter one and quarter four. And the reason we're only doing those two quarters is. Quarter two and three. You never know about weather. There's holidays. We're just gonna trial it a little bit more, but we are bringing it to four different locations for this school year. So we'll have PE in the Anaheim Hills area, so Orange County, the Redlands area. Again, in the Temecula, Murrieta area and then the Yucaipa area. we tried to find places where a lot of our students reside and try to tap into those regions. And so depending on how quarter one and quarter four go this year, which I can tell you there's already a lot of enrollment. Maybe next year we would bring it for all four quarters. So we, we love kind of experimenting and seeing where interest lies. One thing that we hear over and over again is that students wanna get together in person The other part of that too that's amazing is bringing on these new art teachers that we have. We are gonna be offering art in the park two times per month, where we will again, pick different regional locations and our art teachers will go teach a live art instruction, some kind of class, and then anyone is welcome to join and do that right along with them. So we're. We're really trying to build as much community as we can and, and tap into not only the virtual platform, but also being in person together. So good. And I think our parents are, students are really gonna love that. Okay. With all of these offerings that are so amazing, how can families choose? Is there a way that they can see what different courses are going to be offered through the year? So we did release our catalog just this week as well as enrollment just opened a few days ago. I worked really hard this summer to try to make it so we could see a year long plan of Oakschool. One. Part of feedback that I received last year was by quarter four, a lot of families were out of funds and they were really bummed out because they couldn't pay out of pocket. And had they known that a certain class was gonna be offered, they would've saved their money for that class. So I thought, let's shoot for the stars and see if we can get all of these classes laid out for the entire year. And so this couple days ago, we ordered enrollment for all four quarters so families can see a year long schedule. Because not everything is offered every quarter. So that's kind of where you have to dive in and say, okay, if I wanna take. A music class, when is that offered? If I wanna take a language, when is that offered? And then they can work with their teacher to kind of plan out what that's gonna look like. We have the beautiful Oakschool catalog, and as you look through the catalog, something else new this year is we have filtering options. So you can filter by subject area or content. You can filter by grade level, you can filter by quarter. And then you can actually enroll straight from the website. There's an enrollment button. One is for our p l a program, for our personalized learning. One is for v l A. Our virtual learning students only take classes on Mondays because Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they're meeting with their regular live teacher. So, lots of opportunities there. I do encourage families that if you wanna enroll, I would get that ball going 'cause classes are filling and it's a great time over these next couple weeks to meet with your, your teacher and ask them about what they suggest. Are there classes that they've come across that would be great for that personalized learning plan for, for the students. So enrollment is open, all the parent directions are there as well. We've tried to make it accessible for everybody in a very easy enrollment process. All they need to do is talk with their teachers and see what what classes would be great for their student. If they wanna check out the entire master schedule and the full catalog of offerings, they can find that on the website and they can enroll straight from the website as well. So. Awesome. So good. Well, Kiley, we are excited about all of the new offerings that you are bringing to Oakschool. I know this program is continuing to grow and it's going to continue to be a great success for our school and a great benefit to all of our students. So thank you so much for all of your hard work and the team's efforts in bringing this program to Sage Oak I think it's gonna be fantastic. Love it. Oh, I am. I am so excited. I feel like every day I wake up and I'm just so excited to see how many enrollments that we're getting and that families are excited about it. We've had a really positive response so far. So I would love to see that growth keep happening and I cannot wait to see to step into these classes and observe the teachers in action. That's always my favorite part, is just you, you do all the enrollment, you do all the planning, and then when the actual classes start with the fruits of the labor, it's just amazing. So I'm very excited. All right, so we will drop a link in the show notes to the catalog that is available on the Sage Oak website so you can check out all of those courses. Alright, thanks KIley we always love talking with you. So great to hear all things that are happening with Oakschool. Thanks for dropping by the podcast, and you'll have to keep us updated throughout the course of the year. Thank you, Tiffiny