Hands on Learning

Hands on Learning - reflections on Semester 01

Hands-on learning at EMC is learning by doing. 

HOL students engage with projects outside of the traditional classroom setting to solve a problem or create something. This allows students to learn from real experiences. For Izzy and Seb, our HOL artisan teachers at EMC, hands-on is their favourite way to teach. It’s fun and engaging, and as we know, we all develop skills much faster when we’re having fun!

The Hands-on team has put a focus on three main project areas this Semester:

Construction, cooking and growing food in our market garden. 

The students worked on fixing up our HOL hut, building new dry walls, as well as constructing new garden beds to grow veggies propagated from seed.Another highlight for everyone has been the weekly cooking sessions where we have started to cook dishes from scratch: we fermented our own dough for super delicious wood fired pizzas; made pasta from scratch and prepared a sauce using broccoli from the market garden; and cured bacon in honey and maple syrup for super delicious BLTs (with lettuce also from the garden!)...just to name a few.

Sustainability has played another big role. The HOL students worked alongside EMC’s newly formed 'Green Team' to find a way to divert the school’s food waste from landfill. We constructed new composting systems and bred thousands of compost worms to break down EMC’s food waste into an invaluable resource (aka worm castings and worm juice). A great initiative on our journey to becoming a more sustainable school!