Bats!

Today, the Organization for the Conservation of Bats came in to give a presentation for all the Summers-Knoll students. It was terrific! The kids got to see five live bats, each of a different species, as well as seeing lots of pictures and learning about the habits, abilities, and usefulness of bats in our world. I'm so glad we had this wonderful opportunity!

Ladysmith Black Mombazo

This coming Monday, February 1, our school is going to see a special performance at Hill Auditorium, by the famous South African group Ladysmith Black Mombazo. I am personally very excited about this, since I have always loved their music, and they have a reputation for being amazing performers. The performance is from 11am to noon; we will leave the school around 10:20 and return around 12:30. Ruth Marks and I will be taking the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades on the city bus to get to and from the concert, so please send your child with $1 in quarters on Monday, to pay for bus fare. (I will put this in an email, as well.)

Improbable inventions

This month, I've been reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy out loud to our class. It's a funny and exciting book, but it's also got a lot of interesting scientific, philosophical and mathematical content that engages the kids on a different level. Some of it is over their heads, but most is just within their comprehension, and I think that's a good mix: they're getting to encounter some new ideas, ideas they can play with, and they also have the sense that there is more here waiting to be plumbed, so they pay close attention. The adventurous plot helps, of course.

One of the main ideas we've been exploring is improbability. The Heart of Gold spaceship is run on an Infinite Improbability Drive, which causes all sorts of bizarre coincidences to occur within the story. We've had a lot of fun toying with improbable ideas, and it's been interesting to hear the kids discussing the difference between "probable," "improbable," and "impossible." We made a chart on the board one day: I asked them to give me a probable event, and then we changed the same thing to make it improbable and then impossible. The first example I got was "Christmas will come next year." That, we all agreed, was probable. The improbable version was that Christmas would not come next year. The impossible version (contributed by Mike) was to say that Christmas is always, definitely coming.

The kids have all drawn Scenes of Improbability, which are arrayed on the classroom wall as you walk in the door. Each picture is accompanied by an improbability factor, in the style of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, such as "two to the power of six hundred thousand thirteen to one, against."

As a class, we've written limericks about improbable things!

If humans could live on Neptune

Then they would all live in cocoons.

Oh, it would be cold there

Pears wouldn't grow there

All pianos would be out of tune.

This book has provided a lot of worthy avenues of exploration, but I think improbabilities have the most potential for fun!

Specials

I'm sure everyone knows what a wonderful job our specials teachers do—Imogen, Ruth, Jan, and Shan—and sometimes I am absolutely taken aback by the fascinating dolls I see when I pass through the art room. I walk into my room at the end of a French class and find webs of related words (in 3 or 4 languages) on the board:

So I just wanted to send a quick thank-you to all the kids' amazing teachers! You do such incredible work with them.

Some recent photos...

From math class:

From a visit with Elaine's class, to decorate bags for MLK Day:

From Friday's science experiment:

(an explosion of corn starch!)

Caves

Welcome back in the New Year!

Our first Summers-Knoll theme of 2010 is Caves. This will be another science-oriented theme for our room. We'll be taking our study of caves (our speleology) in several directions, looking at different types of cave dwellers, the formation of caves, and the underlying structure of our planet. Today, we watched the Planet Earth episode "Caves" with Mrs. Carpenter's class. In class this week, we'll be doing some individual experiments in preparation for a group project: building a scaled model of the earth's layers. Both at school and at home, the kids will be working on a small-scale research project on the cave system or cave-dwelling organism of their choice. This will be more closely supervised and structured than our previous research this year, with a strong focus on the stages of developing a research project. It's going to be a great theme, I think!