Penny-whistle: We are working on several tunes now, and I’m encouraging everyone to take their whistles and books home on the weekends. Several of our tunes have chords printed on the music. If someone in your house plays an instrument suitable for accompaniment (guitar, banjo, piano, etc.), it would help your child practice in rhythm (albeit slowly) and hear how the melody’s structure is firmly entwined with the key and the chordal changes. Also, some of our tunes are duets (which, as I tell the kids, are “stolen” from a recorder book). Here again,  a parent or sibling might tackle one part while the whistle-player practices the other. We made PVC pipe cases for our whistles. Although penny-whistles are fairly sturdy in themselves, travel in a backpack can lead to all sorts of mysterious debris invading the mouthpiece.

Cold Weather: Your children are quite durable in the face of chilly adversity, but their teachers are perhaps less so. On Wednesday, we came back to school to find that our building and several others had no heat. Chuck had called for service as soon as he knew (our alarm system includes a low-temperature sensor), but the building was so cold that it took all day for the rooms to reach a comfortable temperature. On Thursday, we were misled  into optimism by the warm rooms we found in the morning. On Friday, we had no heat again. Fortunately, we have few enough in our group that we could retreat to our breakout room with its lower ceiling and smaller space to get maximum benefit from a couple of oil-filled heaters and our big hot water pot that added some humidity. We discussed the nature of heat (it rises, and it seems warmer when humidity is higher) to make sure we let no teachable moment go unacknowledged, no matter how cold we are.

We didn’t let our children go outside for choice on Friday — it was just TOO cold — but did have them travel to specialists. At least one didn’t take a coat, and another left one in the music room. Please join with us in educating your children about safety in very low temperatures! In particular, they all need something to cover their faces: a ski mask or a warm wrap-able scarf would do. We’ll remind them to bundle up, but they need to leave home with the right winter-extreme gear.

Social Studies: As we have said before, we are into a short unit on the ancient Celts and Romans. We’ve done some general work with maps showing territory and language groups around the Mediterranean, started to read a delightful mystery/humor novel set in the city of Rome near its empire’s height, and are about to spend the next week looking at the daily life and larger history of the Celts, especially in Britain and Ireland. Our students are enjoying my collection of Asterix comics. We did a vocabulary lesson that centered around the many puns that are part of the text. For example, the village bard is called Cacophonix, and the seller of putrid fish is named Unhygenix. A Roman soldier is named Ignoramus, and a senator is called Larcenus. Even Asterix is a pun — he’s the little star of the story!

Holiday observances: We talked a bit on Wednesday about Lent, Ash Wednesday, and the day that came before —  popularly known as Pancake Day, Doughnut Day, Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, and Carnival (among others). We talked about the Christian beliefs and traditions that are part of this time as well as popular but non-religious events, such as the pancake races often done in the Midwest.  What do you do when you need to get all of the meat and meat-based fat out of the house for 40 days of fasting and reflection in recognition of a holy sacrifice? Fried foods work for disposing of fats, and the partying of Carnival (whose name comes from the Latin word for meat) sets up a contrast with the somber days of Lent that follow. For some of our community, this is a matter of faith and belief. For the rest, it’s a matter of multi-cultural literacy: what are some of the people around us celebrating, observing, doing — and why? As we get closer to Passover, we’ll talk about that, too. Does your family observe or celebrate something that we haven’t acknowledged? Let me know about it, and I’ll work with you to help our group become more aware of what some of their peers are doing.

Reading/Writing: As we noted above, we are all reading a single book: Detectives in Togas. Originally written in German more than 50 years ago,  it’s a bit different from the books our children usually choose to read. The characters are sketched rather than developed, and the central characters in the story are all boys (except for one sister with very limited opportunity to involve herself in the plot).  Still, several of our class have said that they are having trouble stopping at the assigned breaks in the story because they want to know what happens next. It’s good to see that they are able to embrace an older fictional style than that to which they are accustomed, just as they did with Lassie Come-Home.

I’ve started reading a new chapter book to the group. I had originally  intended to read them The New Policeman, an Irish-based fantasy by Kate Thompson. But there was another favorite book that won out: The Hounds of the Morrigan, by Pat O’Shea. This is a sweeping fantasy that also has a lot of embedded Irish mythology and presents a good balance of plot tension and humor.

Mathematics: We have arrived at another of our “pausing places” in our blended-class math program, just as we did before November’s conference week. Our students will return to their respective home classrooms for the next three weeks to engage with topics as a whole group. We are going to build skills in the measurement of length, mass, and volume — in English (“customary” or “standard”) units that relate to the fractions with which some of our students have been wrestling as well as metric units that will connect with the decimals that others of our group have been mastering. We’ll measure a lot of things, work on establishing an internalized sense of linear distances, and grapple with circle measurements that lead to the relationship known as pi.

We’ll have a lot of fun with our alligator Gro-Beasts. Made of water-absorbing polymer, they will grow every day for a while in their water-filled plastic boxes. We’ll weigh, measure, and trace them to estimate the area of their body “footprint”– and we’ll graph their growth in several ways. Stay tuned.