One of the things we have been doing in various ways through the year is developing students’ vocabularies. We stop to discuss words and phrases when we are reading fiction aloud and when we are reading novels in small groups. We do focused lessons on words that relate to classroom activities such as math and social studies. And we do worksheets from several resources that strengthen students’ understanding of common prefixes, suffixes, and roots. (Those worksheets have been what we have been doing lately.)We speak of that collection of word parts as being a kind of verbal Lego — building blocks that can be assembled in many different ways. One of the things that is very clear to us is that formal definitions are often insufficient for understanding. That is, vocabulary needs conversation, and Mark and I provide that conversation as students do the work.  Sometimes we chat with individual students, and sometimes we share the question and our response with the whole class.  The advice to “look it up in the dictionary” is usually not very effective. Students need to know the meaning that is relevant to the current need, not a dozen different ways that a word such as pitch might be defined. They may need some help with grammar — is that word an adjective that needs to be accompanied by the noun it describes? Perhaps it’s a transitive verb that needs an object to make complete sense. It might be a word that is pejorative and therefore to be used very carefully. So we encourage you to stop and talk with your child when s/he comes to you with a vocabulary question. It’s a lot more effective than being sent to a dictionary.

We finished our work with geometry constructions on Thursday. We may find time to return to it before the end of the year, but there is a lot left in our plans. Most students enjoyed the unit. They became more adept at working with hand tools, came to a strong appreciation of what ancient people did with the same tools, and understood more of what Geometer’s Sketchpad seems to do so magically. We connected it specifically with the kinds of geometric decorative art found in areas to which Islam was spread — from the Middle East to Spain and beyond as Spanish colonists carried the style to the New World. We did some coloring of tessellated designs based on Islamist decorative tiles from hundreds of years ago, seeing how the same basic patterns could be used to yield many different final designs.

Part of the challenge of this unit was to work with spatial relationships that were not quantified:  construct a perpendicular bisector of a segment without measuring the segment or the angle, bisect an angle, copy a triangle, and more. The guide sheets we used were essentially wordless beyond stating the goal — students needed to analyze the diagrams and do the steps in sequence.

At the end of the unit, we did some “curve stitching” within various polygons, seeing how the same shape could be “stitched” in different ways (images at right). Students always find this very satisfying and quickly catch on to the linkage patterns that must be followed.

 

 

One of our most important “social” studies is the one we call “Changes and Choices.”  It encompasses a lot of topics: peer pressure (both positive and negative); body systems and puberty; sexually transmitted diseases; identity and the many ways we are “perfectly” normal; sustaining healthy relationships with family and friends; understanding the effects of tobacco, alcohol, and many drugs (both “street” and legal); appropriate use of social media and what to do when it goes wrong; and much more. We hope that your children are coming home with questions that they may not have asked in class.

Part of our study of the foundations of Islam includes stories. I’ve started reading aloud some of the 1,oo1 Arabian Nights by Geraldine McCaughrean and Rosamund Fowler. Students are enjoying the tales, seeing connections with what we have been learning about Muslim beliefs and practices, and recognizing some stories and characters (such as Sinbad) that they thought were modern fiction. Another thing we did this week was research some inventions and discoveries that are sometimes credited to the Muslims. Each student was given a topic (vaccination, coffee, cameras, algebra, fountain pens, robotics, gunpowder, and more) and tried to find out what connection these things actually had with the Muslim world. Some were clearly attributable; some were not original but were developed and improved, and some were apparently not connected with Muslims except by mistaken belief. It was a good short project that demonstrated the importance of d0ing research in more than a single source.

Students presented their independent reading projects to classmates during the week. There was a broad assortment of authors and genres; everyone seemed to be pleased with their choices and seemed confident and relaxed while talking to the group. Some worked on schedule and were ready on Monday (or sooner). Others were still finishing their poster and talk during choice times right on through Thursday, but everyone got there eventually.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And our chicks came to school on Monday. Four are “sex-link” hens whose color indicate their gender: females are red and males are white.  These chickens are like the ones we had at the start of the year — prolific layers now part of the flock at my house so we could get our rat population under control. The other two are a relatively new hybrid called “tetra tints” and are supposed to lay cream-colored eggs. Students in our building are observing rapid growth and near-daily physical changes in the chicks as they go from downy fluff to increasing feathers. They still need to be kept indoors and warm, but they’ll be going outside to the renovated pen by the end of the year. Camp will enjoy them over the summer, and we’ll start collecting and selling eggs in the fall. The important job now is teaching them to trust and be friendly toward people. Lots of gentle chick handling is going on at choice time, and we are seeing personality differences not only between the two breeds but also in individual birds.

 

It’s been a busy time. Passover began our week and Easter ended it. Two of our parents (Amy Cohen and Don Tracy) were kind enough to come in and share the stories of those holidays along with information about their own family celebrations. As we have observed throughout the year, our students were reluctant to offer information or ask questions (despite our continuing efforts to get them to take some risks with that), so we hope they at least brought any questions or comments home. We have had the most success with overcoming this cautious silence by given them time to talk in smaller groups first, sometimes with specific guiding questions or statements to explore. But we are frequently reminded that this is one of the reasons that we typically create a blended 5th/6th grade grouping structure. The younger students are often much more open to asking questions that reveal ignorance (as are our current students when they are in a smaller group or talking alone with a teacher). Although we are confident that this year’s split-grade structure was a good one for most of our students in both classes, this can be one of the drawbacks.

In addition to discussing the holidays, we also told students that the Passover story of the freeing of the Jews in Egypt from bondage was one that became very meaningful to enslaved Africans in this country, raising hope that they, too, might be freed through divine intervention. In an upcoming Wednesday morning sing, we will include some of the related songs that became part of the African-American music tradition. By the way, our two classrooms will be leading the assembly on Friday, April 25. If you’d like to hear some of what we’ve been singing each week, please join us. (Assembly starts at 9, ends at 9:30.)

As our individual reading projects and the small-team science projects reach conclusion in the coming week, we can see that many of our emerging adolescents are not yet ready to take full charge of independent work, even when they have chosen the subject or topic. In the classroom, we see that heavy socializing took away the opportunities that the open working time provided. Although we reminded our off-task students many times that they were adding to their homework load by drifting and chatting, it was hard for many of them to make the right choice in the moment. And, although we did do some direct intervention (such as re-locating students away from friends), we also decided to allow them to experience the natural consequences of their actions. Did this problem affect everyone? Not at all. We have a number of students who read steadily at home, worked on research for their poster in addition to doing the reading or in place of reading when they needed to wait to get their next book, and looked confident about enjoying the weekend before the Monday target date.

Communication with Sue last week alerted us to the fact that many of the students who were behind on their reading project were also behind on their science project. By the end of the week, however, most of those students had worked in the science room during their lunch choice time on Thursday and Friday and are now ready for next Tuesday’s Art and Science Showcase.

Personal Projects will be starting in the first full week of May. They will comprise a major part of homework during the month of May as we begin graduation speech-writing in the classroom. Written explanations of the timetable and expectations for this project will come out before the end of this coming week and will be posted as pages on our homework blog. It’s our hope that all students will make a choice that holds their interest, that can be accomplished through frequent and sustained engagement, and that they are proud to present when we finish. If your child is one who struggled with time management (and/or getting essential materials) for either the reading or science project, perhaps some additional parental help with planning and follow-through would be helpful.

One other and more encouraging observation we have about our group as a whole is that of increased social awareness and general responsibility. This means cleaning up spilled snack without being asked, offering to help when they see that the teachers are busy, cheerfully giving up a few minutes of free time to get classroom supplies, and more. The detail-loaded job of running our lunch sale is going with remarkable smoothness — very few things are missed when the lunches are tabulated, packed, and delivered, and we hear a lot of voiced pride when everything goes as it should. We hope you’re seeing some of this evidence of maturation at home.

We’re coming to the end of our probability study. It’s provided opportunity for review of a number of skills and concepts, including percentages, fractions, averages, ratios, and coordinate graphing. We believe that just about everyone understands that you need to do a lot of trials before you have valid data, that every chance event is independent of those that went before, and that theoretical probability doesn’t guarantee that experimental probability will match it.

We’ve also been doing some plane geometry, working with hand tools and also with Geometer’s Sketchpad. Students have learned to use a compass and straightedge to copy segments, angles, and triangles. They have found one or two ways to create a square that is truly square. They’ve worked with line segments that are perpendicular and parallel. Vocabulary has been an important part of our lessons. Students will have some work to do at home using their hand tools next week. In addition to being a math topic in itself, this work is connected with the elegant decorative art that is part of Islamic culture.

We will have 6 little chicks arrive on Monday. Although we will be keeping only 3 or 4 at school in the end, having  6 to start means that we can choose the most docile for our classroom flock. We are VERY grateful to the students and parents who repaired and cleaned out our chicken shelter during the recent work party. It was not an easy job, but we can now look forward to a rat-free environment for several years to come. The wire lining of the floor area had rusted over time, and we were spending far more money on chicken feed than we should have been. (Chicken feed is no longer a suitable metaphor for a low price!) We’ll be posting pictures of our little pullets as they, too, mature. They’ll be in the classroom for a while, as they will need to be kept warmer than the outdoor shelter will allow.

It looks as though spring has finally arrived. Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of snow and below-freezing temperatures!

It’s been a highly eclectic week.

We’ve been trying to read and discuss at least one poem most days, partly to inspire kids about working on their prose and poetry choices for Miquon Grass but also because it’s just a good thing to do. In connection with the recent Junior Scholastic article on World War I, we shared several works, starting with In Flanders Fields. The page we gave out had the poem and two very different illustrations.  As we talked, several students recalled that they had seen red poppies during Memorial Day weekend but had not known the association. (Apparently, the decomposing bodies of the dead changed the soil and made it ideal for wild poppies to thrive — seen by many as a natural metaphor for the bloody battles that had occurred.) We then read the lyrics to Eric Bogle’s song titled No Man’s Land but often called The Green Fields of France or Willie McBride. We compared the underlying message of the two works — the one written during the war basically urged others to keep fighting, largely out of respect for those who had died for the cause. The other (written just after the end of the Vietnam War) said that there were no lessons learned from WWI that led to any lasting peace, a bitter and ironic observation. The third poem that fit within the war theme was Seamus Heaney’s Requiem for the Croppies. Several children remembered learning what a requiem was from a poem we read last fall about the first killing frost and the death of countless insects. We explained that “croppies” were Irish men who, during the British occupation of Ireland, wore their hair short — in contrast to the long-haired aristocracy.

As we have been learning more about the foundations of Islam, we have begun to teach and review geometric construction with traditional tools — compass and straightedge.  In viewing Allah as the sole creator of life, Muslims have stayed away from representational art and decoration, especially in mosques, and have developed beautiful tessellated, patterned, geometric designs — often built around 4- and 8-sided figures derived from circles. 

There’s a very good website about it here:  http://patterninislamicart.com/

We’ll be doing some similar constructions using Geometer’s Sketchpad on our computers, but establishing the relationships through construction by hand will make the Sketchpad work more understandable and less “magical.”

We’ve done some note-taking research to understand basic elements of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. We have an excellent collection of print resources (with great thanks to the Diversity Book Sale that takes place during our spring fair) and also used a couple of websites that we had checked for balance and accuracy before making them available to the group. We’ve also completed a small-team project to create a wall display to show the “Five Pillars” of Islam (prayer, charity, fasting, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the declaration of faith). The coming week of school includes the beginning of Passover and ends with Easter. We have a couple of parents coming in to talk about each holiday; we appreciate their participation very much.

Now that we have sneaked some geometry into social studies activities, we have also begun a probability unit in math time. Some students did some explorations of probability earlier in the year, but now we are all doing things — rolling dice, tossing cups and coins to see how they land, and the like. It’s giving us a chance to apply and expand students’ understanding of fractions, ratios, and percentages as we quantify our results. We’ll be looking at some connections with genetics (who among us can roll their tongue or has an attached or pendant earlobe?) and with geometric probability as we create targets for virtual dart-throwing using Sketchpad.

Students keep walking up to the Miquon calendar to count the days of school that remain. The End is Near.

 

We finished up our work with mathematics related to circles this week. We had a lot of fun on Thursday with the Internet Pizza Server. Students were asked to calculate the price per square inch of the four pizza sizes that are available, with and without the bizarre toppings that the site offers.

The idea of a unit price was new to many of our group. We talked about finding ways to compare prices in the grocery store when products come in different sizes made by different companies. The next time you and your child are shopping together, please take a few minutes to show them where the unit prices are posted and how they might influence a purchase decision. Consumer education is a very important part of math education in general.

On Friday, we used our Math in Focus texts to apply what students had learned about finding the diameter, radius, circumference, and area of circles. The end-of-unit problems were challenging to everyone because they required more reasoning than just running some numbers through the formulae.  Here’s one of the middle-level examples:

Students were asked to calculate the area of the black region. They were told that the square was 10 cm on each side. They had already solved problems related to finding the area of a quadrant (fourth) of a circle during the class. This one required realizing that there were two overlapping quadrants here — one was part of a circle whose center was at point A, and the other’s center was at point B.  The overlapped area was the black region. The radii of those circles were equal to the length of one side of the square, or 10 cm. To find the area of the black region, they needed to find the area of one of the quadrants and subtract it from the area of the square. That would leave the area of the other white region. When they know the area of the two identical white regions and the area of the square, they will be able to calculate the area of the black region.

So, at this point, they would have calculated the area of the square as 100 square cm and the area of each full circle as pi times 10 squared, or 314 square cm. (We were using 3.14 as an approximate value for pi.) So the area of each quadrant was 314 divided by 4, or 78.5 square cm. If we subtract one quadrant area (which is the black region plus one white section) from the area of the entire square, we get 100 – 78.5, or 21.5 square cm. The two white regions together must equal 21.5 x 2, or 43 square cm. If we subtract that from the area of the square, we are left with the area of the black region — 57 square cm.  This didn’t require any new formulae or algorithms, but it did require a lot of thinking and, for many students, the drawing of additional diagrams to “see” the full circles and understand the solution.  This is true mathematics. The part that a calculator plays is just about incidental. The math resides in the thinking that students are asked to do and which no amount of technology can replace.

We have begun our study of the foundations of Islam and its connection to West African kingdoms much later. In order to understand the core beliefs of Islam, we also need to know some basic things about Christianity and Judaism. We did several activities to build some of that understanding. One was asking students which of those three religions was the oldest. There was general disagreement within the group, with some students putting their vote behind each one of the three. As they are learning now, Judaism is the oldest and was followed by Christianity and then Islam. There are beliefs and traditions common to all three because of their shared history. To add to students’ general knowledge. we asked them to make a guess (educated or not) about the percent of the population in the USA and also in the world who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, non-religious, and “other.” They did this by coloring squares in a 10 by 10 grid to represent each percentage. We then looked up the information in several sources, found minor disagreement, but got fairly consistent answers. Students then colored new 10 by 10 grids to show that information and compared their first estimates to them.

As happens every time we do this, most of the group were amazed to find that Judaism (worldwide and within the US) is practiced by only about 1% of the population. This gave us a chance to talk about how much our sense of reality is influenced by narrow experience that we usually don’t recognize as narrow. We happen to live in an area and be part of a school community in which many more than 1% of the people are Jewish. But we are not representative of the world or even the nation in that respect. We also colored maps of the world to show where those belief systems are dominant. The next surprise was to see how much of the world is considered “animist” — which we defined as believing that there are spirits in all of nature. We talked a bit about how we might respond as animist believers  if someone came along and announced that those spirits didn’t exist and that there was just one all-powerful god. Most students agreed that it would be hard to accept, partly because of the evidence before us — natural disasters, fluctuation in success with crops and hunting, variations in the length of day and night (extreme in some places), disease, accidents, and more. It could seem very logical that those things were controlled by many different forces, and that they might be interpreted as deities and other spirit forms. So it would not be surprising if the idea of monotheism were met with a lot of resistance. We will go on doing some other activities that will enable students to learn more about the entire list of religions we mapped.

We also did some introductory vocabulary work relating to this and will continue with that. We talked briefly about terms such as heretic, infidel , theocracy, animism, clergy, adherent, secular, and more.

We started watching a long animated film called “The Life of Muhammad” and will finish it in the upcoming week. It gives us a fairly authentic perspective as it was made by Muslims and was approved by several authorities within that religion. One of the traditions is that the person of Muhammad is never drawn or shown. So the film-makers had to solve that challenge, and they did it by showing parts of the story from Muhammad’s viewpoint. That is, when he is in a scene, we often see it through his eyes. We’re having some good discussions about this kind of decision-making in films generally as well as taking time to talk about the story as it unrolls.

Junior Scholastic Magazine often contains articles that are not related to what we are doing in class but which are inherently interesting to our students as well as helping to build their general knowledge. They all enjoyed the cover article in our current issue which explained the science behind the attraction of snack foods such as Doritos. Another major article was about World War I. Since this is a period that none of our students have encountered in previous years as part of their exploration of history, we have decided to give it some time to create a broader understanding. Students have read the article but not done much with it.

This coming week, we will do some map work to learn more about the location of much of the fighting and also to see the extent of the Ottoman Empire, talk about the article’s explanation for how a small event led to a world war, read and discuss some related literature, and look at some images. The literature part will be twofold: the poem “In Flanders Fields” which was written by a soldier during the war — and the song “No Man’s Land” by Eric Bogle, written just after the end of the Vietnam war. The map work about the Ottoman empire will also connect with Islam, in that it was a Muslim theocracy whose influence is still present in much of the conflict in Europe and Asia today. Clearly this will not be a deep study as we are not giving it that much time, but we could probably spend the year on it and still leave a lot undone.

We hope you are hearing about some of this at home, or at least can get a conversation going if you ask.