As always, there’s no time or room to talk about everything, but here is a sample.

On Monday, we found that our two Monarch butterflies had emerged, and by late morning they were ready to be released and start their 2,500 mile journey to Mexico for the winter. This is always magical, even if students have had the experience every year.

To have a butterfly walk across your hand and then take to the sky to start the long trip to a place they’ve never been before reminds everyone about the fragility of nature and its amazing aspects.

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We had three graduates return to visit with us on Thursday. This is an important tradition for several reasons. One is that their descriptions of their experiences in their new schools give our fifth and sixth graders some idea about what they are likely to be doing in a year or two. They are living proof that there is life after Miquon and that middle school offers many new things to learn and enjoy. Another reason that it’s important is that it provides closure for our graduates. As one parent said after her child’s visit last week, “It was good for her to feel welcomed but at the same time to notice that she doesn’t belong to Miquon as a student anymore.” Most of our visitors take that realization as an affirmation of their growth and new school affiliation, not as a loss.

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 We went to the Mercer Museum in Doylestown on Wednesday. We had set up a scavenger hunt based on the list of supplies available for packing our wagons. Students were challenged to find such things as a steel plow, a 2-man crosscut saw, a spinning wheel, a Dutch oven, animal traps, a powder horn, a wine or cider press, and a yoke for two oxen. Our science teacher, Kate, came along as did parents Don Gordon and Bill Demski. This made it easy for students to explore the many floors of this eccentric structure in small groups while keeping an adult in sight. (There will be many more photos on our classroom website soon.)

Students saw many things that were not on their checklist, too. An antique fire engine, an enormous animal feed trough carved from a single tree, and a collection of instruments that included a mountain dulcimer all caught their attention. The display of beautiful  things made from horn and tortoise shell showed us what people used before they had plastic. The general store (moved from its nearby location and reconstructed in the 1950s) contained things with brand names we can still find in our kitchens today. And, above all, we saw how much work went into making the ordinary things of people’s daily  lives — most of which were made of wood — and many of which incorporated decoration as well as functionality.

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Although we have begun working with our Math in Focus resources, we took time to do two other things that used and expanded students’ math skills when we had several students out on Thursday. We did a demographic analysis of the two wagon train teams. Students looked at the number of people in each family and figured out the average (mean), median, and mode. They described the number of members who were under 16 as a fraction and as a percentage. While doing this, they learned about some of the features of their calculators, discussed how “common” fractions and percentages were both different and similar, and reviewed or added to their statistical vocabulary. We’ll be returning to all of this many times through the year, so the absence of some students will not create a learning gap for them. We also played with thin pieces of paper to explore Mobius strips, invented by August Mobius in 1858 — not long after our journey west. We were all so busy investigating, cutting, and conjecturing that I forgot to take pictures, but it was a lot of messy fun. Another special math activity happened on Friday, when each student started creating a spreadsheet to calculate the profit from our first hoagie sale. We’ll finish that next week. This involves a lot of discussion of economics, the use of formulae, and what it takes to run a business. We think it’s important to de-mystify the use of computers as much as possible, and this helps to take the “magic” out of our wagon-packing spreadsheets.

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Minicourses started last week for the three oldest groups. These self-selected activities meet on Fridays and give students a chance to do something new or spend extra time in a favorite thing. Two of our students are in the “Making Stuff with Wood” minicourse that Kate and I are leading. With three other students, they built a workbench on Friday that will be available for general use by all older students at choice time as well as for teacher-led projects. I brought in my cordless impact driver to help with the construction, and they were delighted by its ability to drive very long screws into thick wood.

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Finally, our wagon trains are now on the trail. Next week’s class time will contain some (mis)adventures. Be sure to ask your children about them. Perhaps they’ll even share their diary entries with you.

This week’s activities included our first lunch sale. There are a lot of steps that require close attention and effective partnership. Students distributed order forms to classrooms on Monday. On Thursday, it was time to tabulate the orders on a chart for each classroom, check the money inside, and make sure that the record-keeping was correct.  They worked in pairs except for one student, who got some help from Jeri but did most of it on his own. On Friday, the teams needed to pack a big tub with a correct count of the items. They did well — we had only two mistakes, and they were easy to fix. This is an important learning opportunity. Students this age (and older!) are inclined to assume things are correct without doing a close check. As a result, there are errors in their work (writing, math, research presentations, etc.) that they could have fixed on their own if only they had looked more closely or worked with an editing partner. We find that we can often use their lunch sale experience to motivate them to do other verification, and they understand why it helps.

Everyone’s dulcimer is now completed. We have a couple of instruments whose strings are buzzing a bit and need some adjustment, but that should not be a big problem. This was another experience that went better with a partner, and we were pleased to see how readily many students stopped what they were doing to help someone else.

When the fretboard had its tuning gears installed, it had to be glued to the dulcimer body, which first needed to be folded into shape. Then we put on some weight and waited for the glue to dry.

Then students put on the 3 strings — perhaps the most difficult part of the project. But everyone got it done. We gave out the instruction books that came with the kits, and we’ll work on learning to tune the instrument and play some simple songs next week.

Our wagon train simulation is getting closer to the departure moment. A few students need to finish packing (using a spreadsheet on their Google drive). They were given a large list of possible things to take. The items are all assigned a “Bulk Weight Unit” rating that is a combination of mass and volume. The wagons will hold 1500 BWUs — not one unit more. The spreadsheet does the calculation, which many students declared to be “very cool.” Next week, we will do some analysis of our lunch sale income and profit that will include teaching everyone how to create a spreadsheet and incorporate formulae that will crunch the numbers. Our trip to the Mercer Museum next Wednesday will enable students to see many of the items they have packed, making the wagon contents much more real.

One of the questions that has arisen during the packing is just how big a wagon was. So we got out some of the big cardboard that we’ve been collecting for future construction projects and laid it out on the floor. A typical covered wagon was about 4 feet wide, 2 feet deep, and 9 – 12 feet long. If we include the tongue that extended out of the front to which the draft animals were hitched, the total length was about 23 feet. The top of the canvas cover was about 10 feet off the ground. With the cardboard, some tape measures, and a long pole, we were able to make those dimensions meaningful.

Students are reading novels related to the journey west and keeping up logs that contain a generally-true fact that they have inferred from the story and also a comment or question about the narrative. I read through their posts each day and try to give each one a response. It allows for very personal conversation about the student’s book, although there is a liveliness and variety of perspectives in a book group meeting that is missing from this activity. We’ll be doing book groups later in the year.

Math has been done in a number of ways so far. Jeri and I will be starting to work with the Math in Focus materials next week, and students will meet with us in small groups, but we will continue to do lessons, activities, and projects that are not part of that program.

One of our math activities has been an afternoon bingo game at the end of the day, quizzing students on multiplication facts. The games have been done as “call-out” so that students whose facts are strong can enjoy their competency and those who are still learning them can get a sense of what they need to work on. Students have spent some time with the Xtramath website and will continue to do so as part of their homework and classwork for quite a while. We have focused on number sense and reasoning through “Thinkermath” puzzles. We did a combination of language skills and math as we began some “Word$Worth” puzzles. If every letter of the alphabet has a value based on its place in the sequence, what is your name worth? Can you come up with one or more words worth 50 cents or a dollar? Can you find a 5 letter word that starts with B and ends with E that is worth 47 cents? What’s the most expensive 6-letter word you can make?  There’s a lot of addition and spelling practice embedded in this activity!

Sumdog is a website that offers many kinds of math activities in a game-like setting. We will soon be adjusting individual students’ accounts to make sure they are being offered an appropriate level of challenge. In the meantime, the exploration is a lot of fun at the basic level of difficulty.

Next week, we hope to release 2 monarch butterflies. We’ve been watching for a color change in each chrysalis, and we hope they will be ready to emerge very soon. We’ll also spend some time with our chickens. The three young hens are laying an egg each almost every day. What will we do with the eggs? We’ll sell some to help pay for their food, and we’ll do some scrambled-egg breakfast-making occasionally. Everyone seemed to be pleased about that.

We’re looking forward to meeting with parents at Back to School Night next week.

Our camping trip seemed to be an enjoyable adventure for everyone. The weather was not as warm and sunny as we would have liked, but it never rained and kids did a lot of swimming as well as playing in the woods. Thanks to the parents who drove and/or helped: Mike, Don, Katrina, Thakiya, and Liza. Jeri and I would have had a very hard time doing it all on our own (even with Tony’s help, which we also had).

Mike took lots of wonderful pictures like this one above, and we hope to add them to this post soon.

On Wednesday morning, we did some handwriting practice, spent a little time discussing the names of the months of the year and the number of days they have, and explored some of the nature information we have about monarch butterflies, as we now have two lovely chrysalises that we hope will emerge as butterflies late next week. This is not a photo of ours, but it’s a better picture than I was able to take.

We discussed parasites briefly — not a word that most of the group knew. One of our worries is that a tachinid fly may have laid an egg in one or both of our caterpillars before we collected them. If so, the egg will hatch into a larva that will destroy the developing monarch. All we can do is keep our fingers crossed.

We spent a short time on our classroom computers — teaching the students’ new Google drive password (which is miquon1415 for everyone — not to be changed), looking at our homework blog and the pages it contains as resources, such as printable graph paper.

We seem to have more students than usual who find the keyboard to be very unfamiliar ground. It would make a big difference not only to this year but to their schoolwork for many years to come if they can all spend some home time working on this skill. We will present some strategies and typing advice in the classroom as well as teaching about basic skills for using the programs available on the Google drive, but we can’t provide the kind of consistent daily practice that learning to touch type requires. We hope parents (and motivated students) will be able to take this on at home.

There are commercial programs out there, but there are also a lot of good free online typing tutors. We will be collecting a list of them and sharing their links as a Google doc with the students. Please let us know if you find something worthwhile — it should have kids practicing words and letter sequences, not zapping letters as they fall down the screen like a video game. Ideally, it keeps a record of students’ work (or puts one on your computer), adjusts the speed and other features as students work, and gives a progress record somewhere.

On  Wednesday and Thursday, we continued working on building dulcimers. Now that the bodies were painted, it was time to put parts onto the fretboards. Driving tiny screws is an acquired skill — so we’re doing a lot of instruction and explanation. Why use  screws instead of nails? Why won’t this screwdriver work? What’s a ratchet handle? Some of what we’re talking about is the math and science behind the music — the spacing of the frets, the length and thickness of the strings, and how vibration speed relates to pitch. AT this point, almost everyone has installed the tuning machines and folded their dulcimer body into shape.

We did some math on Thursday morning. The “Thinkermath” book of puzzles presents a paragraph with missing numbers and provides an answer bank. The challenge is to figure out which number goes in which space, paying close attention to the wording of the problem. It’s excellent for developing number sense and for realizing how closely (and how) often we may need to read the words in order to understand the situation.

We also talked a bit about things that are part of writing: voice, organization, awareness of the reader, conventions such as spelling and punctuation, word choice, and more. We spent about 20 – 25 minutes writing about either something from the summer or the camping trip. This gives us a benchmark starting point for evaluating and developing students’ skills through the year. We will do this at least twice more between now and June, using it as a planning tool and also to help students set goals and appreciate their progress.

This blog is posting a day early because I will be going out of town for a music weekend in Massachusetts on Friday. The class will be in the capable hands of Jeri and Ted.  Next week, homework begins in earnest . . .

Three days don’t seem like much, but I feel as though I have learned a tremendous amount about our class in this short week. The sixth graders are ones that I got to know a bit as neighbors and through shared projects last year, but our current fifths were less familiar to me. We have a group that is funny, creative, polite, inquisitive, persevering, and just purely likable. It’s a small group, and I think there may be times when we will wish there were more of us. But we have some scheduled opportunities to blend with our neighbors in Diane’s group (such as having a combined PE class on Thursday mornings, building dulcimers together, and having a sing on Wednesday mornings) as well as many informal times.

The first days can be a bit boring — there’s a lot to explain and a lot of questions to answer. This year , it was even more true because everyone is new to this classroom, so there were no “old hands” to help with that. But we plunged right in to starting our dulcimer project, in part to give us a break from all that sitting and listening.

The first step is painting the cardboard body inside and out to make it more moisture-resistant.

We did some painting-skill lessons — how far to dip the brush into the can (not very far!), how to wipe excess paint off inside the can rim, and how to wash a brush until it’s really clean. Students chose colors from our donated and purchased paint collection and got going. They also started sanding the edge of the fingerboard to smooth out the sharp ends of the metal frets. “Fret” and “bevel” were new vocabulary words for many of our students. Next week, students will finish painting if they aren’t already done (most are), glue the dulcimer body together, and move on to the final assembly steps. We’ll detail that in our next weekly blog. Soon, they will have an instrument that looks more or less like this:

An internet search will turn up a number of good videos that show what might be played on this delightful instrument. We’ll be looking at a few of those sometime next week, but parents and children may want to do a little exploration before that.

We gave out a lot of supplies and books on Friday. The cubbies suddenly look inhabited by serious scholars! Please keep an eye out for calculators, math tools, and other things that need to come back to school but which may be left wherever your child did his/her homework.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Independence when it comes to reading and following directions is one of the things we try to build in many ways through the year. “The directions are on the box” and “Have you read what it says at the top of the page above the questions you are trying to answer?” and “Tell us what you do understand about the directions as well as what you don’t get, please.”  So one of our first challenges was having some students assemble the big weatherproof storage box that was a gift from last year’s graduating students. After putting most of it together in the room (without asking me a single question!), they figured out how to take it down the hill to the side of the playbarn stage, and then they put in the game equipment that was also part of the gift. There’s some money left, and we’ll be surveying other groups later in the year to get ideas for what we need to replace or could add to the collection.

We spent some time working on the 2 puzzles that were included in the students’ August welcome letter and put a new math challenge into the mix as well. We had student sit in groups of 3 or 4, encouraging them to talk about the strategies they thought would work, compare solutions, and see if they could come to any agreement. The water bucket puzzle left everyone baffled, the new one elicited three different solutions (where only one could be correct), and the matchstick puzzle was solved at least one way by everyone. We’ll be looking at all of these again as a group next week.

Looking ahead: If the weather cooperates, we’ll have our camping trip next week, and we’ll include news about that in next week’s blog. We’ll be getting started with our study of American westward expansion and will be combining that with some math as we look at demographic changes in the USA across several hundred years. We are working with a new program from the U. S. Census Bureau called Statistics in Schools. The activities are under development, and our classroom is one of the “early adopters” so we’ll be sending advice and feedback to the people that are creating them. A lot of it is not only perfect for our math curriculum but also blends well with our 2 units involving US history.