Chapter 1

From Awakening to Living

Many children struggle in school not because they lack intelligence, but because they cannot find an entrance into understanding. Others gradually lose motivation because they no longer know why learning matters to their lives. When learning loses meaning, children often seek refuge in virtual worlds, games, or temporary forms of belonging.

Arco Experimental School was founded in response to these two educational questions:

• How can children learn to understand?
• How can children become willing to learn?

Over years of educational experimentation, Arco gradually developed four interconnected frameworks: MINE, Sim Life, PLUS, and LIVING.

MINE (Multiple Intelligence Niche Exploration) was developed as an intelligence stage that helps children learn through different entrances. Based on the theory of multiple intelligences, MINE integrates language, music, images, movement, manipulation, roles, and situations into different pathways toward understanding. It allows abstract concepts to become accessible through multiple forms of perception and participation.

Sim Life was developed as a life stage that helps children become willing to learn. Through simulated professions, missions, relationships, and responsibilities, children enter meaningful situations in which learning becomes connected to identity, dreams, and future possibilities.

PLUS (Personal Learning Unfolding System) was developed as a supportive decoding environment. Through mixed-age interaction, differentiated participation, flexible structures, peer support, and apprenticeship-style learning, PLUS creates the conditions in which understanding can emerge and grow.

Finally, Arco sought to develop LIVING — a life community shaped by love, offering, models, and shared responsibility. In this community, learning is no longer limited to academic achievement, but becomes part of how children understand themselves, relate to others, and participate in life.

Together, these four frameworks form the educational philosophy of Arco:

• MINE opens entrances into understanding.
• Sim Life transforms learning into lived experience.
• PLUS provides the environment that supports decoding.
• LIVING cultivates a community in which life itself may flourish.

Within this larger framework, Arco further discovered that many children experience surprising breakthroughs when learning occurs through musical intelligence rather than only through linguistic intelligence. Rhythm, sound, movement, and embodied interaction often allow abstract structures to become tangible and emotionally accessible.

Through years of classroom exploration, Arco gradually organized a decoding framework called the CHARACTER Decoding System, consisting of nine learning conditions:

• C — Context：when abstract concepts are grounded in context
• H — Home：when an apprenticeship environment is present
• A — Affection：when learners desire to participate
• R — Read Aloud：when text is interpreted through voice
• A — Awakening：when learning is driven by questions
• C — Commitment：when content is refined to its essentials
• T — Transfer：when problems are represented through media
• E — Encoding：when answers are verified through structure
• R — Recognition：when learning is presented before others

These nine conditions are not a checklist, but a set of interrelated supports that help children enter understanding. Different lessons may activate different conditions; however, when these conditions consistently exist within a learning environment, children gradually develop the ability to decode abstract concepts.

Chapter 2

Classroom Examples of the CHARACTER Decoding System

The previous chapter introduced CHARACTER as Arco’s decoding framework. This chapter presents classroom examples that illustrate how each condition appeared in actual teaching practice.

These examples are not intended to show that every lesson contained all nine conditions. Rather, each example highlights one condition and demonstrates how Arco designed learning experiences that helped children enter abstract understanding.

C — Context: When Abstract Concepts Are Grounded in Context

Tile Shops and the Embodiment of Square Roots

In teaching square roots, Arco did not begin with mathematical symbols. Instead, children first entered the context of a “tile shop.” Acting as shop owners, they used small square tiles to construct squares and explore the relationship between area and side length.

Children first described the structure in Chinese:

“A square with an area of 9 has a side length of 3.”

They then expressed the same idea in English:

“The square with an area of 9 has a side length of 3.”

Only afterward did the teacher introduce the mathematical expression:

√9 = 3

At this moment, the teacher introduced “how masters say it,” helping children discover another language: mathematical language.

Children often reacted with surprise:

“It’s so short!”
“So powerful!”

Mathematical symbols were no longer unfamiliar marks, but a condensed language that captured experience and structure. Thus, Context grounded abstract concepts in meaningful situations before symbolic representation was introduced.

H — Home: When an Apprenticeship Environment Emerges

Exploring Prime and Composite Numbers Together

In a lesson on prime and composite numbers, children from first through fifth grade explored mathematical structures together. Rather than beginning with formal definitions, the teacher first presented a number, such as 13, and invited children to divide it evenly using chess pieces or grid paper.

The children arranged the pieces into one row, then two rows, three rows, four rows, and so on, testing every possible arrangement up to 13 rows. They discovered that 13 could only be divided evenly into one row or thirteen rows; all other arrangements produced remainders. The teacher then demonstrated the number 12, showing that it could be evenly arranged into 2, 3, 4, or 6 rows.

Only afterward did the teacher introduce the terminology:

• Numbers that could be arranged into “rectangular boxes” were called composite numbers.
• Numbers that could not be evenly divided except by 1 and themselves were called prime numbers.

This lesson became a Home because it contained three essential conditions: mentor awakening, peer support, and accessible tools. The teacher guided learning through questions and awakening; children observed, imitated, and supported one another; and chess pieces and grid paper remained constantly available for repeated manipulation, revision, and verification.

Thus, Home was not unstructured freedom, but an apprenticeship environment in which understanding could grow.

A — Affection: When Learners Desire to Participate

My Treasure and Classroom Shops

In a sharing activity called My Treasure, each child brought a personally meaningful object to class. Rather than allowing free and unfocused sharing, the teacher guided children to focus on several key questions:

• What is its name?
• Why did you give it that name?
• Why is it important to you?

Because the objects genuinely mattered to the children, they prepared voluntarily and worked hard to express themselves clearly.

The same phenomenon appeared in classroom shop activities. When children knew they would bring products, set up stores, welcome customers, and complete transactions, they usually required no reminders from teachers. They prepared on their own initiative.

Thus, Affection was not simply about making learning “fun.” It emerged when learning became connected to life, and children began to desire participation.

R — Read Aloud: When Text Is Interpreted Through Voice

Language Immersion and Relay Reading

In language immersion lessons, the teacher first told a story while inviting children to enter different roles and help build the situation together. When the plot required dialogue, children naturally needed to read the lines aloud.

The teacher transformed the story into a script and allowed children to choose roles they liked, including the narrator. Since the lines varied in length and difficulty, children could select parts that matched their abilities.

Through relay reading, text was no longer merely a set of symbols on paper. It was interpreted through pauses, tone, rhythm, and emotion.

Thus, Read Aloud gave text a voice. It allowed children to enter understanding through sound, while also enabling them to choose roles they were able to fulfill.

A — Awakening: When Learning Is Driven by Questions

When Music Tiles Begin to Speak Chinese

In a music lesson, children sang Little Chick Drinks Water. In Mandarin Chinese, when a third tone is followed by a first tone, the vocal contour often forms a fourth interval. For example:

• xiǎo jī 小(3)雞(1) → E A
• hē shuǐ 喝(1)水(3) → A E

The teacher used music tiles labeled E and A. Children first recited “小雞喝水” in Chinese, and then played E A A E on the tiles.

When they discovered that the melody produced by the tiles matched the tonal contour of the Chinese phrase, they often responded with surprise:

“The music tiles can speak Chinese!”

At that moment, children were not merely receiving an answer. They were suddenly seeing a structure between language and music.

Thus, Awakening became the ignition point of decoding.

C — Commitment: When Content Must Be Refined to Its Essentials

Young Anchors and Young Reporters

At Arco, textbooks were often hidden from view. Instead, the teacher first designed an activity, sometimes even replacing the textbook with a video, so that children could enter a situation before organizing its content.

In the Young Anchor activity, the teacher first played a video for children to watch carefully. Afterward, children identified key words and wrote them on the board.

The teacher then guided children to reconstruct the event through those key words, form sentences together, remove unnecessary details, and preserve what was essential. Finally, each child expressed the event in their own words:

What do I feel about this event?

Another example was the Young Reporter activity. Before interviewing an expert, children first studied the expert’s background and identified the questions they truly wanted to ask. When facing the expert, they then verified whether their understanding was accurate.

Thus, Commitment was not merely effort. It was the ability to identify key points, remove distractions, and gradually form one’s own viewpoint.

T — Transfer: When Problems Can Be Represented Through Media

Solving the Chicken-and-Rabbit Problem with Chess Pieces

Transfer did not primarily address children’s inability to calculate. It addressed their inability to understand what an application problem was asking.

Therefore, instead of beginning with equations, the teacher first invited children to solve the chicken-and-rabbit problem with chess pieces.

• White pieces represented heads.
• Black pieces represented legs.

Children first arranged the heads, and then assigned legs to each head. Chickens had two legs, while rabbits had four. Through arranging, comparing, and verifying, children gradually understood the actual relationships within the problem.

A problem that originally could only be “thought through” became a structure that could be manipulated. Many children who could not solve the problem mentally began to solve it once they started working with their hands.

Thus, the core of Transfer was not simply changing the teaching method. It was transforming an abstract problem into a medium that children could see, touch, and manipulate.

E — Encoding: When Answers Can Be Verified Through Structure

Exploring the Area Formula of a Circle with a Hundred Grid

When learning the area of a circle, the teacher did not begin by giving the formula. Instead, children first drew a quarter circle inside a hundred grid and then subtracted the squares outside the curved boundary one by one.

Gradually, children discovered:

A quarter circle occupies approximately 78.5 squares.

The teacher then guided them to organize the structure:

• 10 × 10 = 100
• 78.5% of 100 = 78.5
• Multiplying by 4 gives the area of the whole circle.

Through this process, children began to see that the area of a circle is related to “radius times radius.”

Only then did the teacher introduce the mathematical master language:

A = πr²

At this point, the formula was no longer a symbol to be memorized. It became a structure children had discovered through manipulation, approximation, and organization.

R — Recognition: When Learning Is Presented Before Others

Research Presentations and Turning Stories into Scripts

At Arco, research lessons always included presentation. Children did not merely complete research; they had to stand before others and teach them.

They needed to explain:

• What did I not know before?
• How did I find the answer?
• How did I verify it?
• Why do I believe this is true?

True understanding was not only being able to understand something oneself, but being able to help others understand it.

In another example, turning stories into scripts may appear to be a Read Aloud activity on the surface, but at a deeper level it was also Recognition. Children did not simply read a story; they used roles, lines, and performance to help the audience enter the situation.

Thus, Recognition was not merely the display of results. It was the process through which understanding became visible, audible, and comprehensible to others.

Together, these examples show that CHARACTER was not a fixed lesson format, but a set of learning conditions through which abstract understanding could emerge.

Some lessons began with context.
Some depended on tools and peer support.
Some awakened understanding through sound, rhythm, and voice.
Others helped children refine information, transform problems into media, encode structures, or present understanding before others.

Across these different lessons, the central movement remained the same: children were not asked merely to receive knowledge. They were guided to enter, experience, transform, verify, and express it.

In this way, decoding became more than comprehension. It became a process through which children gradually learned how to see structure, make meaning, and communicate understanding.

Chapter 3

Sim Life: From Refuge to Realization

Many children do not reject learning because they lack ability. Rather, they cannot see how learning connects to life.

When reality becomes disconnected from meaning, children often seek refuge in virtual worlds. Games provide temporary belonging, identity, missions, rewards, and emotional compensation. They offer a place where effort appears meaningful.

Sim Life emerged from an important educational question:

Could education provide these experiences in real life rather than only in virtual worlds?

Instead of treating games merely as distractions, Arco began to ask what psychological and educational needs games were actually fulfilling.

As a result, Arco gradually developed Sim Life — a life-based learning environment without screens or keyboards, where children assumed roles, completed missions, participated in relationships, faced consequences, accumulated experience, and pursued realization through lived situations.

In Sim Life, learning was no longer separated from life. Mathematics became part of trade, construction, timing, budgeting, and verification. Language became part of reporting, storytelling, negotiation, and performance. Music became part of rhythm, cooperation, emotion, and cultural expression.

Children gradually discovered that learning was not merely preparation for life:

learning itself became part of living.

At Arco, instructional units were not primarily organized as lesson plans, but as activity designs. The purpose of these designs was not simply to deliver knowledge, but to awaken situations.

In conventional instruction, teaching often begins with concepts and explanations. In Sim Life, learning begins with context, rhythm, roles, relationships, and experience. Knowledge does not knock on the door first; the situation does.

Children first entered a world.
Only afterward did they begin to recognize its structures.

Thus, an activity design was not merely a sequence of tasks. It was the design of an awakening.

From this foundation, Sim Life gradually expanded into different professions and social roles.

Children did not merely study occupations from textbooks. They entered situations and became participants within them. A marketplace required shopkeepers, customers, accountants, and reporters. A hospital required doctors, nurses, patients, and caregivers. A research center required investigators, presenters, and evaluators.

Context naturally brought children into roles, and roles naturally brought them into qualifications.

A child who wished to become a shopkeeper needed to calculate correctly.
A child who wished to become a reporter needed to ask meaningful questions.
A child who wished to become a researcher needed to verify evidence before presenting conclusions.

In this way, qualifications were no longer external requirements imposed by teachers. They became meaningful abilities connected to participation and responsibility within the simulated world.

In Sim Life, television stations and newspapers became important learning environments. These settings required children to become young anchors and young reporters — two forms of training considered essential for Arco students.

Young anchors learned to observe events, identify key points, organize information, and communicate clearly before an audience. Young reporters learned to prepare questions, interview experts, verify understanding, and reconstruct meaning through dialogue.

These activities also cultivated the ability of Commitment within the CHARACTER decoding system: the ability to distinguish essentials from distractions. Children learned to identify what truly mattered, remove unnecessary details, and gradually form their own viewpoints.

Thus, media roles in Sim Life were not extracurricular activities. They were part of the core training through which children learned how to observe, interpret, organize, and express the world around them.

Beyond media roles, Sim Life designed many professions according to the abilities required in different intelligence domains.

An architect needed to see the structure within a drawing.
A musician needed to hear the rise and fall of spoken language.
A comforter needed to listen actively, ask meaningful questions, and help the speaker untie emotional knots.
A politician needed to recognize responsibility, judge situations, and make decisions.

Most Sim Life activities were designed from mathematics curriculum indicators. Different professions were created so that children could enter real-world roles and solve problems through different media.

In this way, ability was no longer an abstract requirement. It became a qualification for participation.

These professions also became pathways through which children encountered foundational mathematical structures within lived situations.

The Identity Law helped children recognize that quantity and structure could remain the same even when appearance changed. Through moving blocks, beads, or patterns, children gradually sensed:

“The outside changed, but the quantity stayed the same.”

The Zero Law helped children understand that emptiness was also part of structure. When all objects disappeared, children discovered that “nothing” was not chaos, but a return to zero.

The Commutative Law allowed children to experience how changing order could simplify thinking without changing results. The Associative Law further developed regrouping and structural organization.

For children, however, the Distributive Law was often discovered through the familiar experience of making change as cashiers in Sim Life shops. When solving:

$99\times7=7\times(100-1)=700-7=693$99×7=7×(100−1)=700−7=693

children could immediately “see through” the structure because it resembled the logic of decomposing money while giving change.

Rather than memorizing algebraic rules first, children encountered mathematical laws through repeated situations involving regrouping, redistribution, and verification.

Importantly, these experiences began in the lower elementary years, long before formal terminology was introduced. Abstract mathematical structures were therefore experienced first as meaningful actions before becoming symbolic language.
Because of Sim Life, mathematics lessons at Arco could extend far beyond conventional textbook exercises.

In one activity, children running a fruit shop needed to record orders containing twenty different items. Using four rhythmic cards, they created different fruits through rhythm patterns and experienced how information could be recorded symbolically.

In another activity, young accountants needed to calculate the total of twenty transactions, even though they had not yet formally learned arithmetic notation. Each child received twenty playing cards along with ten-unit coins. Instead of writing equations directly, children searched for “friends of ten” — combinations that could form ten as a unit.

Gradually, children reorganized quantities into groups of ten in order to simplify calculation. Long before formal arithmetic expressions were introduced, they were already experiencing grouping, place value, and structural reorganization through meaningful activity.

Interestingly, children often preferred activities involving many items rather than fewer ones. The increasing mathematical complexity did not discourage them; instead, it fascinated them. Rather than experiencing mathematics as repetitive drill, children experienced it as the pleasure of seeing through complexity.

At Arco, mathematics was understood as a language that allows human beings to communicate precisely with nature.

Sim Life therefore required children to use their own measuring tools to investigate the environment and discover where mathematics existed within lived reality.

When planning vegetable gardens, for example, children used ropes to divide planting areas into sections. They were not allowed to label plots with names. Instead, they needed to identify locations mathematically.

As children attempted to describe positions precisely, coordinate systems emerged naturally. Mathematics was no longer introduced first as symbolic abstraction, but as a necessary language for identifying, measuring, organizing, and communicating the world around them.

Verification also became an essential part of Sim Life mathematics culture. Answers were not considered complete until they could be confirmed through another structure or representation.

For example:

$4\times2=8$4×2=8

was not verified only numerically. Children were also asked to verify it geometrically by constructing the relationship on a hundred grid or with square units.

Similarly:

$\sqrt{5}>2$5​>2

was explored visually and spatially through chessboards and square constructions. Children discovered that a square with area five must have a side length slightly greater than two.

Thus, mathematical understanding did not remain within symbolic manipulation alone. Numerical, geometric, spatial, rhythmic, and embodied representations were used to verify one another. Verification therefore became part of the culture of mathematical thinking rather than merely the checking of answers.

Thus, Sim Life was not a decorative context added after instruction. It was the structure through which learning became meaningful, responsible, and verifiable.

Children did not merely learn mathematics, language, music, or social skills as separate subjects. They entered situations where these forms of knowledge were required in order to participate. A role created responsibility; responsibility required qualification; qualification required verification.

In this way, Sim Life moved learning from temporary refuge toward real participation. It allowed children to experience that knowledge was not stored for future use only, but could become immediately useful in life.

Sim Life therefore answered the second educational question:

How can children become willing to learn?

They became willing when learning was no longer detached from life, but connected to identity, responsibility, contribution, and realization.

Chapter 4

Sim Life: Designing Situations for Living

At Arco, learning did not begin with lesson plans, but with activity designs. A lesson plan often begins with knowledge: what concept should be taught, what procedure should be explained, and what answer students should produce. An activity design begins differently. It begins with situation.

Rather than asking how to deliver information, the teacher first asks:

What kind of world should children enter?

In Sim Life, children do not begin by receiving abstract knowledge. They begin by entering a context: a shop, a television station, a research center, a garden, a hospital, a story, or a profession. Only after entering the situation do children begin to encounter the structures hidden within it.

One of the most important entrances into Sim Life at Arco came from Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the greatest classics in Chinese literature. The lesson did not begin with formulas, symbols, or diagrams. It began with a stone.

In Chinese culture, a person who does not seem to feel or respond is sometimes described as being “like a stone.” Dream of the Red Chamber begins with such a stone. This stone was originally without feeling. It was later refined by the goddess Nüwa and became capable of awareness. Yet when Nüwa repaired the sky, this stone was left unused. It became the extra stone, the one not chosen, and was abandoned on the Great Waste Mountain.

For Arco, this stone became a powerful educational metaphor. The stone that could not yet feel resembles many children who “cannot learn” because no entrance into understanding has yet been opened. The stone left behind during the repair of the sky resembles many children who become unwilling to learn because they feel unused, unneeded, forgotten, and not recognized.

Sim Life begins from this question:

How can education help the unused stone enter life, gain feeling, and discover its place?

Thus, Sim Life does not treat stories as decorative introductions to learning. Story becomes the environment through which knowledge can first be felt, roles can be entered, and meaning can begin to emerge.