The Capstone Project is a research paper and project that students attending Palos Verdes High School work on throughout their junior and senior years. The Capstone Project requires students to think critically about a topic of their choice. It manifests with the students giving a presentation on their research and work to a group of teachers and parents. The Capstone Project helps students narrow down options for a major and find out if they would be passionate working on their topic long term.
Laura helped her student Olivia with her Capstone Project during her junior and senior years. Olivia was having trouble deciding which topic to pursue for her project. After weighing her different options, Laura helped her decide on examining how documentaries affect public perception of issues. They decided to use the film Blackfish and how it changed the public’s view on captive whales as the basis of Olivia’s paper. She researched the differences between the lives of orca whales in captivity versus in the wild. She worked in the field scuba diving for research and polling people on how Blackfish changed the way they looked at captive whales.
Once she had all of her research completed and data collected for her project, it was time to put it all into an essay. Laura helped Olivia organize all of her data into paragraphs. There was a lot of research, so it took time to narrow down all the facts so that Olivia could prove her initial thesis while still being concise. Olivia was chosen to be part of Capstone Elite where she competed against other selected students as some of the best Capstone projects of the class.
From iLead to AVID, Study Hut covers ground in the South Bay!
Study Hut has had the privilege to extend our tutoring services to local high schools in the South Bay, including South High, Palos Verdes High School and Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. We are able to do this by orchestrating in-class programs like AVID (http://www.avid.org/) in the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District and ILEAD through the Torrance Unified School District. In a typical AVID or ILEAD class, Study Hut will send a number of tutors (typically ranging from four to eight) who each specialize in variety of academic subjects. Our tutors then have the unique opportunity to break the class into smaller groups of students based on subject each student feels that he or she need the most help with.
Last Tuesday was an awesome day at both South High and Peninsula! We arrived at South High for ILEAD at 8am to offer additional tutoring on late start mornings. We then separated the students into a “Math and Science” classroom, and an “English, History and Foreign Language” classroom. Tori and I were put in charge of English, History and Languages room. After an hour of answering questions about everything from World War I and the differences between Preterite and Imperfect in Spanish, our manager Justin was nice enough to take us out to a quick breakfast to refuel before we headed up to PVPHS to tutor in AVID for their third and fourth periods.In AVID we like to take a more hands on approach by encouraging the students to break into groups and take turns writing their questions on the board. Their peers then use their notes and textbooks to help them solve their problem. In my English groups in AVID, we had some remarkable discussions about Animal Farm (my favorite) and determining Direct Objects vs. Predicate Nominatives.
Palos Verdes High School AVID Family! It’s time for our 5th Annual Car Wash. In this blog, I will try to address some questions you may have about the Car Wash. Here we go….
DO WE NEED EVERYONE’S HELP?
Yes. We need everyone’s help.
HOW CAN I / MY FAMILY HELP?
Your family can help in some of the following ways:
1) Attend the Car Wash and wash cars. Bring the whole family. It’s a fun day!
2) Bake some delicious treats for the bake sale end of the car wash. If you’re able, package them for sale, but if you’re not able to package them don’t worry. You can bring them game day or you can deliver them the day before to your AVID teacher’s classroom.
3). Bring liquid refreshments to the car wash. A case of water or a gatorade type beverage is fantastic. A 6-pack of water or beverage is fabulous. Bring what you like to drink and bring a couple of extra for someone else and then we’ll have plenty. Bring your drinks on game day or bring over the next couple of days to your AVID teacher’s classroom.
4) Bring food for you and a few others. Families in the past have brought: breakfast burritos, bagels, subway, pizza, Taco Bell, and more. Again, bring what you like and if you feed 2-10 other people then we’ll be able to keep all our troops fueled up for the morning and post car wash clean up.
5) Bring a cooler for the drinks. If you bring it game day, ice would be clutch. If you bring it to your AVID teacher’s classroom by Friday we will get the ice (if available down in the athletic trainer’s office).
6) Do you or someone you know play in a band? We need more performers for the concert end of our Car Wash and Concert.
7) Bring some towels home to wash and dry. If everyone takes one load home, that will “spread the wealth” on this fun job. Wash and dry at your leisure and return to your AVID teacher.
8) Wear a costume on the day of the wash!AVID CAR WASH FUN (and some not so fun) FACTS
The Car Wash started 5 years ago and almost nobody (except the AVID teachers) thought it would be successful. The highest anyone at PV High had made on a car wash was between $1,000 to $2,000. When you factor in the $50 most AVID families spend on their 5 car wash tickets and all the students at PVHS buying car wash tickets for extra credit, we have made $10,000 or more many years on the car wash.
Where does the money go? The money is deposited into our ASB account. Our biggest expense is tutoring. Our tutors do not make a ton per hour, but over the course of 10 months, it adds up. Also, we pay the teacher tutors for their good work in January and June when they man our after school finals tutorials. Other money is used to defer the cost of buses when there is an AVID trip, or to pay for the substitute teachers when an AVID teacher is chaperoning an AVID trip, to pay for the AVID t-shirt (coming soon) you receive the first semester each year, to pay for some classroom supplies, and some Fun Friday costs and more! The money cannot come out of our AVID ASB account without a receipt. So everything is documented and on the up and up.
THANK YOU for helping make the AVID Car Wash and Concert (and Bake Sale) one of the best days of the year. See you Saturday. Teachers will be at school from 6:45 am to the end of wash (hopefully around 1:30 if we have a large clean up committee 🙂
There are two types of “New Clients” at Study Hut Tutoring. There are the clients who call us when something has gone wrong, such as a bad test grade or some missing assignments they need help with. The other type of client is the proactive type; this client calls the Hut way in advance, getting times with a tutor well before a big test or Final exam.
These proactive clients often cite “getting an edge” as the reason for calling. Whether they hear about it from a friend at Parras Middle School, or a counselor at RUHS, people are picking up on the buzz, and they are calling Study Hut in Redondo Beach to get the best local tutors available. These clients often call and request a tutor by name, because that is the type of reputation that the Hut has.
Often, groups of friends sign up at the same time. If a PV High Volleyball player calls to inquire about pricing and availability, it does not surprise us at all when two of her fellow Sea Kings call for tutoring later that afternoon. We have quite a few PV and Redondo athletes, including players from the football, basketball, gold, cross country, track, and water polo teams (and more, too!).
