First day of school!

As you can see, we are off to a good start!

Themes for the year

Welcome to our class, everyone!

Here is the list of the Summers-Knoll themes for the coming year:

Sept: Renaissance
Oct: Flight
Nov: Leonardo da Vinci
Dec: Salt
Jan: Theatre and Puppetry
Feb: Simple Machines
March: Poetry
April: Food Science
May: American Prairies

The December theme is different from that which will be followed by the rest of the school. This occasionally happens at Summers-Knoll, and when the theme of "salt" was proposed last year, I got much too excited to give it up. I think we're going to have a fantastic time!

Gettysburg, Pt. 1

Well, here we are, in Gettysburg, PA! It's the end of the second day of our big field trip; we are exactly half way through. It's going really well! So far, we have toured the Julius F. LeMoyne House in Washington, PA (the home of a prominent Abolitionist and a member of the Underground Railroad), visited the Gettysburg Visitor Center and Museum, taken a 2-hour-plus horseback tour of the battlefield, and visited with Max's grandparents in their beautiful home in the Pennsylvania countryside. Still to come: further battlefield exploration, recitations of the Gettysburg Address, an Underground Railroad tour and a scavenger hunt!

Posting photos will unfortunately have to wait until we're back in Ann Arbor (I forgot the connecting cable)...

I hear that the rest of the school is having a lovely time, including a trip to the Arboretum in Ann Arbor. Our thoughts are with all of you, and we can't wait to see you next week!

Outdoors and in...

The Categories of Life

As we move into plant month, the children have been sketching different sorts of roots, bark, and leaves each morning, and as a class we've discussed what we already know about plants. Tomorrow, we'll begin delving more deeply into the question of what makes a plant a plant, by learning about taxonomy. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species will all come into play! I'm looking forward to wowing the children with trees of life that show what a tiny fraction of the world's genetic diversity is contained within plants, animals, and fungi. Soon, we'll be classifying flowers by their morphology, inflorescence, and more. We'll begin learning about cell structure, too, as that is one of the areas where animals and plants most clearly differentiate. I've been looking forward to this month!

We're also taking our spring nature walk with Faye, tomorrow. Here's hoping it's a beautiful day!

Weekly Shakespeare

One of my favorite traditions in our class is our weekly Shakespeare play. Ever since our production of As You Like It, the children have been deeply excited about Shakespeare. So, as we read The Wednesday Wars during February and March, we began learning about one Shakespeare play each week in an effort to keep up with the references the book's protagonist kept using. It has become a beloved tradition: each Friday, I tell the children one of Shakespeare's tales, while they act it out. We all look forward to our weekly Shakespeare sessions; it's even common for spelling bee winners (who have the option to post heroic pictures of themselves on the wall, or have a parade around the classroom in their honor) to name the right to choose their characters in that day's play as their chosen prize. I do most of the speaking and storytelling, but we try to hit all the most famous lines of each play, and afterward, we sit for 10-15 minutes and talk about the themes and characters of the play. Thus far, we have done The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew. My favorite part are the discussions afterward: the children have engaged deeply and shrewdly with such diverse topics as gender roles over the centuries and the relationship of power and choice (The Taming of the Shrew), the nature and pathos of tragedy (Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet), anti-Semitism (The Merchant of Venice), the pastoral tradition (As You Like It), and the results of revolution (Julius Caesar). I am continually astonished by the children's profound understanding of the events, characters and ultimate impact of each play.

This Friday: A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Water cycle

This past week, the kids accepted a challenge from me: they had to design a water cycle system, that could reasonably be built in the school with easily attained materials, that would include the following elements: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration (water absorbing into the ground, or dirt), and runoff. Within a few minutes, the class had begun to put together a design for a system involving a boiling pot of water, some plastic tubing, and a container of dirt with a filter beneath it... On Friday morning, we built it in the kitchen. Alas—the evaporation worked, and we saw some condensation in the tubing, as well—but our water never quite made it all the way through the tubes to the precipitation/infiltration stage, despite an effort to expedite the process by adding ice packs to the tubing. This is one of the things I love about the Summers-Knoll way of learning: it's all right to fail. It can be very instructive! After our water cycle didn't work the way the kids planned, they took some time to write in their theme notebooks about what went wrong, what went right, and how they thought they could improve the system. Perhaps we'll try again, sometime, with a few modifications!