In addition to our usual work in social studies, this week seemed to be full of history. The students started working in the special edition of Junior Scholastic that contained plays about major events in the world of the past and they are eager to do more of them. This kind of activity not only adds to students’ general knowledge but also builds fluency, expressiveness, and confidence for reading aloud.

We spent a couple of days learning about the Gettysburg Address in recognition of the 150th anniversary of its original delivery. We had just read in our history text about the many changes that happened in the USA in the 19th century: the rise of factories, railroads, steamboats, and improvements in agriculture. Students learned that the Northeast region became increasingly connected to the West in an economic sense, while the South remained separate. As regional differences grew (including the increased dependency on slave labor in the South), it paved the way for secession and war. This provided a context for Lincoln’s famous speech.

And we also took note of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. It sparked a lot of conversations at home, apparently, and several students researched it further on their own. As is typical for this age, the many conspiracy theories and odd coincidences were much more interesting to most of our group than the other effects of this event.

We began the activity with a simple sentence on the chalkboard: On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. Small groups of students generated as many questions as they could, improved the wording of some of them, and narrowed their list to ones that they thought were particularly important or interesting. Will we answer all of them? Probably not, but this kind of exercise involves students more deeply than simply expecting them to be receivers or collectors of facts. (Thanks to Marie for sharing this technique with the rest of the staff recently.)

Our first math unit in our Math in Focus texts is coming to an end. Students have been working with positive whole numbers,  prime factorization, common multiples, common factors, evaluating expressions, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, and some challenging puzzles, We’ll do a summary and review and then a chapter test when we return from Thanksgiving break, and then we’ll start working on negative numbers and absolute value. We’ll also be doing a couple of projects in math that will connect with the work we’ll be doing to learn about the Native Americans of the plains and prairie through which our wagon trains are traveling.

Math unit coming to an end, describe, starting negative numbers

We’ve been talking a lot as a staff about play. One of the challenges has been to define play. I recall reading somewhere this definition: “If you’d rather be doing something else, it’s work.” There are better definitions, of course. But one of the blurry areas about play is how, when, or if it becomes or feels real. If the emotions are real in the course of imaginative play —  if we are genuinely sad about the death of our favorite dragon in the midst of a battle, if we feel tremendous pride in our ability to climb the world’s tallest imaginary mountain  — a lot of what we might experience in truly-real situations clearly seeps into play. One of the values of play in our classroom, then, is to connect with some otherwise-distant reality.

Our long trip to Oregon is, in part, realistic play. The students’ wagon train diaries contain a lot of vicarious experience. Although some are still writing fairly briefly, many are deep in thought about and describing in detail what a food or water shortage would mean, what pressures might drive you to take a riskier option, how it would feel to decide (much too late) that the destination isn’t worth the sacrifices it takes to get there, or what it might feel like to lose a family member while crossing a raging river. While our simulation isn’t the same as play students might do at choice time, it does act as a bridge to reality. This week, the three teams debated the three different trails in front of them, all of which involved some risk and uncertainty. As it turned out, each team chose a different route. We’re all looking forward to next week’s events as we learn what each choice is going to mean.

We look for ways to bring the real world into our classroom as often as we can. Our researched contributions to Kiva do that. We have used current sports statistics and data from our hoagie sales to work with proportions and percentages. And the recent typhoon in the Philippines was another way to do something real. We looked up some statistics on the Philippines in our Junior Scholastic “World Affairs” issue — a reference we will be using all year. We saw that the GDP of that country was less than a tenth of the USA’s wealth. We had explained that the GDP of a country helped to indicate what kind of resources that country might have for things such as education, innovation, health care,  highways, and response to a disaster.  We also learned that about a third of their population is made up of children under 16. This was part of what motivated students to agree that we could do some fund-raising through our lunch sale and make a difference. A real difference.

In the end, we raised nearly $1,200 through our usual profits and many generous Miquon families. Geography, economics, mathematics, and meteorology were all part of the lessons and discussions that connected with this effort. It was all very real.

 

This is a somewhat-different post, in that it’s not specifically about what went on in the classroom.  I hope we’ll be able to add some photos and some text to let you know what the kids in our group and Diane and Jeri’s group did during the past 4 days. Do, please, ask your child about it. (Have you subscribed to this blog? If not, you might want to — as you’ll be notified when new things go up here.)

Some personal comments about my perspective on Conference Week:

• I always learn a tremendous amount from the preparation that I do for these meetings. As we engage with your children every day in many different learning activities and social situations, it’s hard to sustain a longitudinal view of their growth. But reviewing their work, revisiting my occasional notes, looking into previous years’ reporting and assessment, and having time away from the daily activities that require more immediate responses and individualized planning all make it possible to think about your child over time and across nominal subject boundaries.
• Parents, as we often say, are the real experts on their own children. And they are also the experts on their family needs, routines, values, and priorities. So our conversation during our conference help me understand those things better —  as well as giving me a chance to suggest things that we might modify in the classroom and/or at home to make both environments run more smoothly.
• I love coming in near the end of the day to see and hear about what our kids are doing. The intense focus on a single over-arching topic ( geography in this most recent block for our students, combined with Diane and Jeri’s 5th grade group) is just what enables many of our students to learn and thrive. Many enjoy the opportunity to go more deeply and to work for a longer block of time than our typical weekly schedule allows.
• Our specialist teachers see our kids much less often than we do in our “home” classroom, and they usually see them in narrower contexts. To spend 4 full days with a group of students as they explore a themed set of topics and go through all the routines of their day (lunchtime, choice time, and more) is often a source of insight and new understanding of each student’s strengths, interests, personality, and learning style.
• Students get a chance to see specialists in a broader way, too. As the PE or art teacher helps you with a math-related task, as the art or music teacher helps you research and write up an investigation, you learn that these people can do more than just one kind of thing.
• Finally, conference week shifts the opportunity (or burden) for planning, collaboration, and implementation to our classroom assistants and our specialists. Much as we might wish it to be otherwise, there is not as much as we would like of close instructional unity between the home classroom and the rich world that our specialists present. But for 4 days twice each year, classroom assistants and specialists come together and enjoy the autonomy, continuity, and flexibility that this break-out block allows.

I’m looking forward to being back in the classroom next week, but I am still reaping the benefits of this out-of-schedule week that our children enjoyed.

Geocaching, anyone? Or how about creating an edible map of our planet?