GCE’s Got Talent: Winter Edition

Posted on by Hiu To

Music Makers hosted our first talent show of the year and it was a hit. We’ve got a lot of talent amongst our community. Music Makers opened up the show with a rendition of The Way I Am by Ingrid Michaelson, followed by a trumpet performance by Ausar and a violin performance by Jeimar. We watched a video of Claire showing off her moves on the ice and we were pleasantly surprised with an original film by Laylah, Genesis, and Zak. Charlie danced and sang the summer’s biggest hit, Work From Home by Fifth Harmony and Josh and Manny performed an original rap.  Teachers, Adam and Brent blew us away with a performance of Rage Against the Machines’ Bulls on Parade. And Music Makers closed out the show with a sing-along to Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots are Made for Walkin‘.

There is no question that GCE’s Got Talent!

We Value Real World Relevance

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We asked our alums how GCE has prepared them for college and unanimously, our graduates expressed the importance of rooting classroom learning in real world problems. The core of our mission is to inspire students to fall in love with learning, prepare them to think for themselves and connect them with the world through their academic subjects. We do this in a myriad of ways formally and informally, but this work is most evident in our City2Classroom model. 2015 graduate, Meshach Maldonado-Lewis responded, “GCE has completed changed my life, just because of what we learned and how we learned it. Especially through Field Experiences, going on field trips every week, being able to see the world, meeting new business people. That completely changed the way I see life.” 

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A Time to Celebrate

Posted on by Hiu To

After an intensive five weeks of deep-diving into one course during the Elective term, students in all four courses demonstrated their learning in an intimate Final Presentations opened only to GCE staff and students. The game designers in Game Changers demonstrated their original board games. The musicians in Radio-rithmetic brought music to life through sound waves and vibrations. The freedom fighters in Global Peace explained Gandhi’s four principles of nonviolence and presented their own examples of nonviolent protest. Least and certainly not least, the movie critics in Ollywood debated passionately over elements of pre-production, production, and post-production of a short animated film.

After a morning of playing, learning, and discussing, all of the hard work was rewarded with a plentiful Holiday Potluck. Friends and families joined us for lunch and this afternoon was a prime example of the love and warmth that are within our tight-knit community. We were joyed to have opened the potluck to friends and families as the students’ hard work was certainly worth celebrating with everyone in our community.

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‘Tis The Season for Giving

Posted on by Hiu To

We embraced the spirit of the holidays and spent the afternoon giving back as a community. We packed toiletry kits and made trail mix to donate to The Night Ministry, a Chicago-based organization that works to offer housing, health care and human connection to members of the Chicago community struggling with poverty or homelessness. We wrote and decorated postcards for kids through Send the Kids the World, a website dedicated to connecting kids with life threatening illnesses with people from around the world. Finally, we baked cookies and shared them togther as a way to show appreciation for each other. This afternoon of giving back gave us a chance to connect as a community and brought out the true spirit of the holidays.

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