Our final week!

School is almost over! We have several special events this week, and I want to keep everyone appraised:

On Tuesday, June 7, our class will be walking over to the new school building, just the other side of the park, to look around a help clean up the outside a bit.

On Wednesday, June 8, we will begin the day with a fun math class, and then have our annual class auction. The children don't need real money for this; fake Summers-Knoll money will be provided. It's a great way of divvying up classroom supplies, relics of group projects, etc., and everyone has a great time.

Wednesday afternoon, at 2:00 p.m., is Graduation! Come join our whole school at the pavilion just around the corner in County Farm Park, as we congratulate our 4th and 5th graders before they move on to middle school.

On Thursday, June 9, the children will receive their portfolios. We'll spend some time reflecting on the year, and then we'll all go to the park.

It's going to be a fun, crazy few days!

Quick trip update!

It's our last full day in Chicago! I'm online at the Apple store, posting a quick summary of the trip so far:

Museums/points of interest visited: Shedd Aquarium, Museum of Science and Industry, Institute of Art, Millennium Park, Buckingham Fountain

Exotic cuisines tasted: genuine Mexican food (that didn't look at all like what the kids expected!), Russian/Eastern European food (a huge success, from the blinis to the chopped liver), sushi, and Chicago deep dish pizza

Private learning experiences: The children cooked spring rolls, chicken and vegetable stir fry, and candy sushi—delicious!

We are tired, but what fun we've had! We'll be back tomorrow...

Beautiful writing

Over the last week (and continuing) in Language Arts, our class has been focusing on descriptive, eloquent, articulate, affecting writing. The children were given the choice of writing a paragraph (complete with proper sentences, correct spelling and punctuation, etc.) on one of four topics:

1) something that you're excited about,

2) something that scares you,

3) something you love, or

4) something beautiful.

After rough drafts, and editing, the children are writing their final drafts on special paper in their best handwriting. Some of the writing I'm seeing is astonishingly expressive and passionate. The topics range from beautiful or dangerous tropical locales, to favorite stuffed animals, to the slow dragging of time until the start of summer vacation. It's wonderful to see the children inspired to put their efforts toward creating writing that will convey to their readers exactly how they feel.

Slope

In math, recently, I've been working with the children in both my math group and Jesse's on the concept of slope. This is not something that is covered in the Singapore books, and it came about because some of my students had questions about the section on parallel and perpendicular lines in the 4B books. I started explaining how to draw parallel lines on a grid... and then thought, "Why not take this just a little farther and really talk about coordinate grids and finding the slope of a line?" That line of thought took us farther than I expected, into the land of formulas and Greek symbols: Δy/Δx is now a familiar set of symbols in the classroom, and we all know that it stands for the change in y (subtracting one y coordinate point from another), divided by the change in x (subtracting the corresponding x coordinates). While I'm not good at figuring out how to type mathematical formulae, here is the formula as it's properly written:

The children have been doing wonderfully. It's an interesting topic to study with children who are at this math level, because on the one hand there are a lot of new concepts to assimilate (coordinate planes, axes, plotting coordinate points, even discussions of different dimensions), and on the other, the math skills required are not beyond anyone's reach. It's been challenging in some ways, but the kids have risen to the challenge. They've practiced finding coordinate points, drawing coordinate grids, finding the slope of various straight lines, and creating challenging slope problems for their classmates. With Jesse, they've measured the slope fo their own bodies in various positions. They've even begun speculating on what it would take to find the slope of a curved line... and that's gotten them all excited about studying calculus, one day!

Food science experiments

We have had some great experimental sessions this month, in and out of the kitchen. Here's a picture of one easy-to-duplicate science demonstration:

Having combined lots of baking soda and vinegar in a tank—thereby releasing a great deal of carbon dioxide—we saw that if you blow bubbles over the top of the tank, those that drift into the tank wind up resting, stationary, on a cushion of carbon dioxide. It creates a great chance to observe the bubbles more closely than is usually possible. In our discussion afterward, the children did an incredibly impressive job of applying their minds and their previous experience to the question of why, when two bubbles are joined together, the smaller bubble seems to push into the larger bubble. They figured out the right answer with hardly any help from me. Ask your child why it happens that way!

This morning, Zachary Williams came into the school (with our own Jesse, his co-mad scientist), and amazed us all by demonstrating electrolysis, separating out the hydrogen and oxygen gases in water. The children were fascinated, and so was I. After we'd finished with the electrolysis itself, Zach went on to demonstrate what happens when a match is inserted into a bottle full of hydrogen, or into a jar full of carbon dioxide. We have a melty soda pop bottle that we're keeping in the room as a souvenir. Don't try this one without supervision, anyone! (Full directions for the experiment, and safety tips, will be available on Jesse's blog: A Medley of Mathematics.)

And, this afternoon, we began an experiment for which we will need chicken bones. So, I picked up a couple of chickens from Whole Foods, and the children were responsible for extracting the bones. We're still working on it, but we had a lot of fun getting our hands dirty and seeing the inside of a bird this afternoon!

Exquisite Corpse

There's a great writing exercise called "Exquisite Corpse" that the children and I have been having fun with in class recently. It's a group storytelling game, in which each child adds a sentence to a story. The sentences are written on a sheet of paper... but the catch is that the paper is folded down so that you can only see the single sentence just before your own. All earlier parts of the story are hidden, and that one sentence is all each student has to go on in understanding what the story is about. The results, of course, are often hilarious and unexpected.

After our first round of Exquisite Corpse, we took some time to discuss what makes a complete and proper sentence—according to our class's version of the game, each contribution must be a complete sentence. I copied one of the twelve stories we'd created onto the board and we all examined it, piece by piece, to see whether it was truly composed of complete sentences. The check marks on the left side of the blackboard indicate proper sentences. The checks on the right side of the board indicate whether or not each sentence follows logically from the one before—even if it bears no relation to previous sentences that the author couldn't see.

Once there was a man named Fran, who wanted to fly to Japan.

He did not have enough money and he needed a new job.

So he went to a school where people studied bones.

The school was a giant skeleton.

It was the skeleton of Elmo the stupid dragon.

The town took them.

Or, more accurately, the town stole them.

Then they sold them and spent all the money on apple pie.

They hated apple pie more than anything.

So they flew to space and ate cheese.

The End.

As you can see, we have some fun with these!

(For the curious, the name "Exquisite Corpse" apparently derives from an early round of the game, played by members of the Surrealist movement.)

Poetry month

Well, here we are wrapping up our poetry theme already! It seems like March has just flown by. Instead of choosing a particular poet or poem form on which to concentrate this month, the children and I have been exploring a variety of poetry ranging from "Jabberwocky" and its made-up words, to Middle English and its half-familiar words, to limericks and haiku. The children have been writing their own short poems—quatrains, limericks, haiku, and styles of their own choosing—and we'll be compiling the poems written by our class into a booklet for the children to take home.

Yesterday, we took a short walk through the County Farm Park to search for signs of spring. The season certainly isn't in its full bloom, yet, but the children spotted mud and grass, and even some more human signs of the season such as cyclists and the ash from a controlled burn in the park last week. Some of the seasonal haiku that the kids were writing today were especially beautiful, and gave me the chills when I read them. We're all waiting for warmer weather and flowers, but in the meantime, we're happy to see the sun.

We've also been on a few visits to Ann Arbor preschools, to share the Summers-Knoll poems "Salmon of the Sun" and "Moon Wolf" with the little ones. My students have loved the experience, I know, and the preschoolers were very excited to see such big, grown-up kids!

Festifools studio visit

Yesterday, Ruth took her art classes to the Festifools puppet studio to get some inspiration, and the teachers got to go along!

Invention Convention photos

Transitioning between themes

It is the first week of March! That means we switch it all up and start a new theme... but sometimes last month's theme isn't quite finished as the new month starts.

The old theme: simple machines. This week will culminate with our school-wide Invention Convention, and I'm hearing lots of great things from the kids about the inventions in progress (or already completed!) at home. In school, we're taking some time this week to work on big Rube Goldberg machines, in groups: the creativity and problem-solving that go into this—not to mention the teamwork—are beautiful to watch!

Here are some photos of the machines as they've come along:

The new theme: poetry! The kids and I had a fun discussion of "Jabberwocky" on Tuesday, identifying invented words and talking about onomatopoeia. As we move into this new month, we're going to explore all kinds of poems, and have lots of fun playing with language.

Valentines

This morning, instead of doing a traditional exchange of valentines in our class, we began by rereading Norton Juster's wonderful picture book The Dot and the Line: a romance in lower mathematics. Norton Juster was also the author of The Phantom Tollbooth. The Dot and the Line is the story of a staid and rule-bound line who falls in love with a perfect dot... but she only has eyes for an unkempt squiggle, "who never seemed to have anything on his mind at all." The book is both mathematical and a beautiful love story; it subtly extolls the virtues of effort and self-control in choosing who one would like to be. We first read it at the beginning of this year, in math, but I've been getting requests to hear it again, and Valentine's day seemed like the perfect occasion. We all enjoyed reading it again!

After our reading, we had a talk about each person's character in the play, and who that character loves. There are many kinds of love: romantic love, filial love, parental love, the love of old friends, the love of teachers and students, the love of loyal allies... The children made valentines to give to the different people their characters love, and passed them around. Some children even drew from their own lines in the play to find expressions of the way they felt about someone, or to get inspiration for describing another character. It was interesting to talk about which characters have only a few ties of affection within the story, and which ones seem to have ties to nearly everybody...

Math and science, part 2

By a fun coincidence, we discovered that in the last couple of weeks, Mrs. Carpenter's math group has been studying probability, while Jesse had also been doing some interesting probability exercises with my group. So, my group took the activities they'd been doing with Jesse, plus a few of their own invention, and we took them in to share with the younger kids. We spun the globe to see where it would wind up, flipped pennies, played a version of red light/green light determined by dice, and "danced by chance"—assigned a movement to each number on a die, and rolled to create choreography! Today, my group finished graphing and discussing our results, and we took our findings in to share. We even videotaped ourselves performing some of the dances, which was lots of fun!

Math and science, part 1

We have had some interesting things going on in math and science, this past week! On Friday, we had the great good fortune to spend over an hour with George Albercook, who is an amazing science teacher. George happened to be at the school that afternoon, and offered to teach the kids about the interaction between heat and changing states of matter: specifically, the amazing fact that when you heat a panful of snow on the stove, the temperature rises steadily to around 32ºF.... and then stays at that temperature for some time, although the burner is still on. Ask your children why! And from the same causes, you can even boil water in a paper container, directly on the stove. The kids pretended to be molecules, and felt with their bodies the difference between being connected in a solid, a liquid, a gas, and even a plasma! The kids were fascinated, and believe me, so was I.

Solid...

Liquid...

Gas...

Boiling water in a piece of paper!

the Mahabharata—a play

Our class will be putting on a play again this year! Last year, we had a huge success with our production of Shakespeare's As You Like It. This year, we're not doing Shakespeare; we'll attempt, instead, the Mahabharata, one of the great Indian Hindu epics. The class has been listening to the stories that compose this myth since before our winter break, and it is a long story all together! We'll have to compress it for our production, and to that end we will be incorporating both puppets and live action, and even masks.

We began the real work of the play in the first week of January, deciding which scenes to include, discussing the design of the production, trying out scenes and characters and designing puppets. Although parts aren't assigned yet, today we had our first scripted rehearsal, with everyone trying out the same scene in different ways. There was some beautiful acting on display!

We don't have a fixed venue or performance date yet, but Joanna and I are working on it. Our goal is to perform before the SK midwinter break begins on February 20th.

Dreamland Theater

What a fun field trip we had today! In keeping with our "theater and puppetry" theme, the whole school went to Dreamland Theater in Ypsilanti, where we got to see a puppet show and have a question-and-answer session with the puppeteers. Everyone really enjoyed the show; during each scene change, there was an enthusiastic burst of chatter and laughter from the audience as the children processed what they'd just seen. There was also some in-seat dancing to the scene-change music!

Back in our classroom after the show, it seemed like everyone had a favorite puppet or two that they'd seen, and some ideas about what they'd liked best in the production. It's great to hear the children's opinions on what they've experienced.

Many thanks to everyone at Dreamland for sharing their art with us!