Week of May 25: Personal Project Presentations

Students did their personal project presentations this week. We could see that there had been a lot of growth in skills and confidence since September. Most did what we asked them to do: just talk to their audience about their project rather than reading from formal notes. Several observed that the preliminary inquiries that they were required to do had made a big difference to their plans and their success. Many thought that they might go on with the project (or something similar) beyond this final week. Several had to engage with major problem-solving along the way, and they seemed proud of how things worked out. As always, it was a delightful assortment of topics and results. Here are some photos of the presentations, a few of which are not quite in focus (my fault, not the camera):

Project: composing 2 pieces of music

Project: composing 2 pieces of music

Project: building a motorized beetlebot

Project: building a motorized beetlebot

Project: learning to do origami

Project: learning to do origami

Project: writing a script, making a movie

Project: writing a script, making a movie

Project: hammer prints and flower prints

Project: hammer prints and flower prints

Project: creating a graphic novel

Project: creating a graphic novel

Project: learning about the night sky

Project: learning about the night sky

Project: revising and continuing her novel

Project: revising and continuing her novel

Project: learning to use Redstone in Minecraft

Project: learning to use Redstone in Minecraft

Project: making soap

Project: making soap

Project: creating an alternate-universe sports magazine

Project: creating an alternate-universe sports magazine

Project: improving baseball skills

Project: improving baseball skills

Project: creating a stop-action video

Project: creating a stop-action video

Week of May 18: kites, bread, and coordinates

Kites: The weather promised to be breezy on Friday, and we were hopeful. The morning was breezy, the late afternoon was breezy, but the wind disappeared in the early afternoon when we went to the lower field to give our kites a chance to fly. It also emerged that the straws we used were more easily bent than the ones we’ve used in the past. So, sadly, our kites were sent home to end their days as colorful sculptures . . . Still, a lot of good learning went into the construction of them, and it was another chance to work in blended groups with our friends in Diane’s group.

kitemaking

kites_runner

kites_lowerfield

group

 

Bread: In science class on Wednesday afternoon, our group made bread with Kate. Then they brought it to our room so it could rise (overnight in the refrigerator) and get baked the next day. Her original plan had been to do it at least once more, adding some ingredients and having students observe the difference between the two doughs. However, Kate is extremely sensitive to gluten, and the close contact with flour turned out to be a problem for her. If I can find the time in the remaining days of school, we’ll do something similar to her plan in the classroom, but we have a lot of other things still to do. Still, this is a good cooking skill to have, so we’ll try to do it.

bread

Some rose better than others, but they all tasted good!

Pictures and Games on the Cartesian Plane:

While Diane and Jeri’s group were away on Wednesday and Thursday on their year-end trip, we launched Geometer’s Sketchpad to do some math with the full Cartesian grid. At first, many students were confused by the 2-number coordinate address of specific points, but gradually it made sense. We had found some instructions for interesting pictures on an internet site. Students were soon plotting points and connecting dots, occasionally checking with each other to see if their results were similar.

coord

On the second day, we played a partner game that involved placing virtual pieces on the screen to get 5 in a straight line before one’s opponent did the same. By the end of the second day, everyone seemed to be quite secure in their understanding of coordinate locations in all 4 quadrants. And it was a lot of fun!

 

Week of May 11 — Gettysburg, Kites, the Spring Fair

GETTYSBURG:

We started the week with our long-awaited trip to Gettysburg. See the previous post for more photos.

Our group plus one former US President

Our group plus one former US President

We took advantage of the small size of our class to hire 4 battlefield guides, one for each car. These independent experts know a tremendous amount about the details of the battle. It’s much better than the recorded car tour because they can answer questions. In addition, their own strong interest in this piece of history comes through strongly for the students (and their teachers!).

After the car tour, we managed a quick lunch and then met up with the park ranger, who led us through a hands-on tour of the Slyder family farm. We had prepared for this in the classroom by getting to know the family a bit (two parents, three children at home, two other adult children living in or near the town) and also looked at a map of their farm with its house and outbuildings. We discussed the decision they had to make: with fighting already started nearby, should they stay or leave? If they leave, they will need to leave behind most of their possessions and animals. If they stay, they risk being hurt or killed, and they still are likely to lose their animals and stored food. Our group decided unanimously to leave, and the Slyders actually did the same. They returned to find extensive damage and loss, as well as several graves of dead soldiers. Despite having built and lived on the property for 10 years, they moved to Ohio and started over again. We wanted our students to understand that there was a civilian cost to war (then and now), and we reminded them that most of the fighting took place in the South.

We ended our day there with an exploration of the exhibits in the recently-rebuilt Visitor Center. There are interactive displays, lots of archival photographs, and many other things to bring us closer to why this war happened and what it was like to live through this time as a soldier, nurse, doctor, and civilian. The bookstore/shop was a constantly-beckoning attraction, and we did give kids time to visit it and be parted from their money.

For children and parents who are interested, a return trip during the summer would be a wonderful experience for everyone. We didn’t see everything at all — and the Cylcorama (as Oliver’s father mentioned) is one of the features that you should consider visiting. In addition, if you have one more seat in your car, we encourage you to book one of the battlefield guides. It adds a depth of expertise to the trip that cannot be replicated any other way.

Our thanks go to the parents who came with us (as well as all of you who got up before dawn to get your children to school and were still awake to take them home again).

TETRAHEDRAL KITES:

Sometime in the fall, I rashly said to one of the math groups I was teaching that we would build tetrahedral kites. When? Not sure, but before the year ends. Well, the year is on the brink of ending, and promises must be kept. Taking advantage of a brief disruption of our regular math instruction while Jeri enjoys/celebrates/revels in her younger son’s graduation from college, Diane and I got started on Friday and will finish the project on Monday next week. Jeri will be back and “regular” math will resume on Tuesday. (Then Diane and Jeri will go off on their NYC trip Wednesday and Thursday, and it will all be new and different again .  .  . but always educational!)

Helpful definition: a tetrahedron is a kind of pyramid. It’s made from 4 triangles, one as the base and the other 3 as sides. (Tetra is the Greek word for 4, and hedron means side or surface.) So the kites are made from straws, tissue paper, and string. It takes 4 tetrahedrons to make a basic kite, and bigger kites can be made by joining multiple basic structures. There is a plan similar to the one we are using at the NCTM Illuminations site: http://illuminations.nctm.org/Lesson.aspx?id=2121 .

So here are some photos from the first day of construction, thanks to Diane. The big challenges for our many of students were reading and following the directions carefully, learning to tie a double knot, cutting string with scissors (pull it tight over the blade before cutting), and accepting that the easiest way to get a soft string into a straw is to suck it through while trying not to swallow the string entirely.

stringcutting

strawstring

paper

tetra1

tetra2

 

THE SPRING FAIR

This is always a lot of fun as well as Educational. When the fair organizers looked for a group to do a “dunk bucket” activity, I checked with our kids and then cheerfully volunteered. Although there wasn’t time for us to do all of the designing and problem-solving in the classroom, I brought an incomplete prototype to school, and students finished working out the kinks. With the help of Jonah’s dad and Eileen Flynn, we got the uprights secured on the basketball back near the playbarn on Thursday. Students used power tools to put the rest of it together on Friday, figured out the right distance for The Chair, and also created a wonderful combination ring-toss and bean bag game that was the activity that triggered the dumping of the bucket.

We had only 11 students to run the booth on the day of the fair, but they did heroically. And, of course, we thank Emily Carner and Katrina Trudeau-Williams for being the adult presence at our booth for the many hot, sunny hours of the day. We also thank everyone who was willing to be a recipient of the bucket deluge — cold and sudden, preceded by the tolling of the gong . . .

screws

bucket

 

nathan_wet

game

jemma_wet

julia_wet

 

It was a full, busy, and extended week. Thanks to everyone who made it such a good one!

 

 

Week of May 4: Gettysburg

We set aside a major portion of our usual program this week to prepare for our upcoming Gettysburg trip. Students used a no-bake clay made from salt, flour, and cornstarch to create the terrain of the battlefield on a tabletop, and we used it to demonstrate what happened on that terrain at the end of the week.

We watched the entirety of the film Gettysburg, stopping often to answer questions and share observations. We spent some time talking about the differences and similarities between a film and a novel — different ways of communicating with the reader or viewer, for example. We noted that every time a new scene opened, a Union or Confederate flag was visible, although often very briefly. This was the director’s way of telling viewers which side they were seeing. We found that it was helpful to turn on captions because the music was often louder than the actors’ words. We shared a range of opinions about whether the music was done well or not.

By the time the film was done (more than 4 hours plus time to talk!), many students expressed some ambivalence about the Confederacy. They were all very clear that slavery was a monstrous practice, but they had also come to understand that the issues were more complex — that it was not a matter of “good North” versus “evil South” — and that the strong attachment to state rather than nation was a white Southern tradition that led to agonizing choices for many white southerners, including Robert E. Lee.

We ended the week with some preparatory activities for our Gettysburg trip on the following Monday. We will be touring the battlefield with a guide in each car. After lunch, we’ll go to the Slyder Farm to get a better understanding of what it was like to have 2 armies meet up in your town and conduct a three-day battle on the surrounding farmland. Would you leave? What about your farm animals? Can you stay and protect your home and property? If you decide to leave, where will you go? We did some preliminary reading about the farm itself and the people who lived there. As we ran out of time, we sent some additional primary source material home to be read during the weekend — journal entries and letters from people who were living in Gettysburg at the time.  The trip will be a wonderful culmination of our intense look at this significant battle.

 

Week of April 27: Personal Projects, Skits and Speeches, Math

As we move into May, there are several traditional things that become part of our day. One is Personal Projects. Like our excursion into Life Skills earlier in the year, these are chosen by students, approved by parents, and done largely at home for several weeks. Students keep up a brief online journal that is handed in at the end of each week. The culmination is a sharing time — we see the art work, eat the food, hear about the dog training, and whatever else has been the focus of each student’s efforts.

This year’s group has chosen, as always, a very varied list of project topics, some of which extend interests and skills they have already, and others that are entirely new territory:

  • Making a film (Cole)
  • Learning about the night sky (Dakota)
  • Improving baseball skills (Dexter)
  • Creating an alternate-universe sports magazine (Django)
  • Composing a piece of music (Estella)
  • Continuing to work on writing her novel (Jemma)
  • Doing stop-motion video with Lego (Jonah)
  • Writing and illustrating a graphic novel (Mahalia)
  • Learning to use Redstone in Minecraft (Matthew)
  • Doing origami (Mayana)
  • Making soap (Nahla)
  • Building mechanical toys (Oliver)
  • Creating hammer prints (Xenia)

The second traditional element reminds us that graduation is not far away. Sixth graders begin to work on their graduation speech, and the fifth graders collect anecdotes from the graduates’ parents to turn into skits that are presented to families and friends on the night before graduation. Resources for speech writing are on our homework blog, but most of the work is done in the classroom.

Math, as we’ve mentioned before, is being done through small group instruction that blends students from both fifth/sixth grade classrooms. We decided to do this earlier in the year because of the unusually small size of our groups and the desire to make sure students had enough learning peers. We have also taken breaks in this arrangement to do mathematics in whole-class groups within our own rooms. For example, we used our whole group time to concentrate on circle-related mathematics, which included working with formulae and “discovering” pi. 

When we returned to our blended groups at the end of spring break, we restructured the groups to mix fifth and sixth graders where it seemed appropriate. Our previous blends had combined classrooms but not grades. This is working well, and the new configurations are giving some students a chance to work together who had not done so previously.

Right now, the six groups are working on several things. Two are continuing to build conceptual and procedural understanding of fractions. Jeri and I are using pattern blocks heavily for this work, as they allow us to work visually/spatially with wholes, halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and twelfths.

patternblocks

 

The same two groups are also using several different levels of the Key To Fractions workbooks, Math in Focus materials, graph paper, and other resources.

fractionworkbook

 

Another group has been working with understanding very large numbers. Diane has read them a delightful book from our library called Millions, Billions, and Trillions.  At the end of this week, they had a sudden “Million Dot Day Parade” through the school, carrying a long strip of paper pages with dots on them that totalled one million. It was really long. And that’s the idea — to try to get a sense of orders of magnitude at levels we rarely encounter (but which get tossed around rather casually when we are discussing the national debt or the cost of a natural disaster).

milliondots

 

Jeri and Diane are each working with a group that is learning more about integers (positive and negative whole numbers) and algebra concepts. The Hands-On Equations materials use a balance-scale model that allows students to discover basic algebra strategies and processes.

algebra

algebra2

 

My other group started out by exploring permutations (including using Diego’s tone chimes to do some change-ringing). We then did a short unit on base two, which included inventing some base-two games using egg cartons and binary dice.

binarygame

We then spent lot of time with proportional reasoning, especially but not only for solving percentage problems. We’ll extend that into learning about ratio and rate next.

percentages