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.