Week of Sept. 21: too much to list here

Our first lunch sale: The kids did a fantastic job. This is “real” work for our group. Some of our fifth graders looked a little startled when we told them on Wednesday that Mark and I don’t check their numbers. We provide help and advice if asked, of course, but we don’t check that the individual orders are correctly recorded or that the totals of each kind of item are right. We simply buy what each classroom team tells us they need. We had no ordering mistakes and had only one minor delivery error, which was quickly handled. (Mark and I were both so busy answering questions and overseeing the process that we forgot to take some pictures. We hope to do better next time, when the kids are more comfortable with the routines and don’t need us as much.)

We enjoyed some spontaneous discussions about expenses that a non-Miquon business is likely to have (building maintenance, heat and light, employee salaries, etc.) and about why we can’t just eat our leftover food (puddings, cookies, etc). This is a conversation you might want to continue at home.

Visitors: One of our long-standing traditions is that we welcome our graduates (no more than 2 at a time) for a visit in the fall and sometimes again in the spring. This week, Nick and Nathan came on Wednesday and gave our students a very positive report on their first weeks at Colonial Middle  School. They described the size of their school (much bigger than Miquon), the start and stop times of their classes (very strange blocks, such as 62 minutes), the courses they are enjoying, and what the supports are if you start to get bad grades. They also said they were enjoying getting grades, making new friends, and surviving the extremely noisy cafeteria. As they left, one of them declared, “There IS life after Miquon!”

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Slide Shows: We’ve asked everyone to have their animal slide show ready for final final editing on Monday and presentation to the group on Tuesday and Wednesday. We’ve reminded them that they should practice their talk aloud — it’s not sufficient to rehearse it in your head. We also reminded them to be sure they could pronounce all of the words they had used in their text as well as in their talk. Several mentioned that they had already checked out a few unfamiliar words and thought it was a good idea. Parents are invited to view their child’s slide show at home. You may also want to look at the comments that I posted when I met with individual students to go through their unfinished work early this past week. Mark, also, previewed a number of projects later in the week and offered some suggestions and editing comments verbally.

The learning goals for this short project are several:

  • become familiar with the features of our presentation software, such as the slide layout templates and transition tools;
  •  improve presentation skills through preparing and practicing a talk;
  • learn to create a source list in an efficient way by using copy and paste from a site’s URL;
  • recognize the importance of using multiple sources for the same topic or subtopic;
  • recognize and avoid questionable internet sources, including student projects and other material that is not from a scholarly source and/or has been peer-reviewed
  • learn to paraphrase and summarize information and also to quote and credit anything that is directly copied;
  • make sure that everything is spelled correctly, written grammatically, and punctuated appropriately because this is going to be “published” through sharing with an audience;
  • recognize the importance of going further with research in order to deal with information that seems incomplete or raises questions; and
  • never collect and include anything you don’t understand — find out what it means.

Did everyone make all of this secure? Of course not, but everyone did  move forward with their skills and awareness of how to proceed in order to get a good result. We’ll be revisiting all of this in a few weeks when students start to research a bridge they have chosen.

Mathematics: We’ve been doing a lot of different activities since school began that are intended to help us get some idea of students’ September math skills and conceptual understanding (which are not always the same as they were in June). We also want to expose everyone to a range of activities that do not require accurate computation in order to broaden their view of and confidence about their ability to work successfully within the very large topic we call math.

We did a short computation quiz on four whole-number operations — multi-addend addition, subtraction that requires regrouping, multi-digit multiplication, and division with a single-digit divisor that could be done by a variety of methods.

Our work with surface area and Cuisenaire rods (making wrappers from centimeter graph paper that fit precisely) gave us insight about several things. How did each student approach the task? For example, one cut out 6 single squares for the 1-cm cube and moved them around on the cube, arranged them flat on the table, and then made a one-piece copy on more graph paper. Another student rolled the rod around on the graph paper and marked each square that it covered. A third started with much more paper than was required and used scissors to work downward until the paper fit. What about the rod that was twice as long as the 1-cm cube? Can we predict how many squares of paper it will need? Some students were sure it was 12. Others held up 2 of the cubes and showed that 2 square faces were “lost” when they were put together, so the surface area had to be 10, not 12.

Some began using the terms surface area, face, vertex, and edge quickly, while others took longer or never picked up on the vocabulary as they explained their ideas. As we moved on to longer rods, the question we floated was whether there was a pattern to the increasing number of squares needed, and we looked for students who were ready to see the pattern and explain why it existed. We also asked about covering a rod that we didn’t have — one that was much longer than the 10 cm rod. Some students could extend the pattern, and some were able to express it as a formula with length as the variable. Generalizing is an important skill, but it takes a certain amount of cognitive maturity (as well as experience with the expectation) before it is within reach.

Accurate linear measurement and understanding of units is built into our toothpick bridge projects, and the hands-on work is just getting started. They will be working with a protractor and 90-degree angles as they prepare their foam core “site.”

We also did some measurement and touched on the concept of proportions when we did a couple of activities on Thursday that involved their own bodies. Are you a square, a tall rectangle, or a wide rectangle? This meant that they needed to compare their height to their arm span.

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We gave them another page with some typical relationships for adult bodies: most adults are 8 heads tall, the foot is about equal to the head height, the shoulder line is about 2 head heights for men and 2 head widths for women, and so on. They began to measure themselves to see what their own proportions were. We reminded them that the handouts were not intended to identify people’s bodies as normal or abnormal, that among adults those proportions will vary from the description, and that they are still growing and are not likely to be proportional in the same way as an adult.

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On two days, we played a game with dice and markers on a small grid that required the use of Cartesian coordinates. Although this was very new for some students, everyone caught on. We did it first on a day when a lot of students were absent. On the next day, we had them teach it to people who had not yet seen it.  Some students had ideas for variations to the game, and we will return to it to try out their ideas.

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This is just a representative sample of the variety of and understanding behind the many kinds of math activities that we’ve been doing. Starting in the week of October 5th, students will be working in small instructional groups that are likely to blend students from both classrooms in our building. We’ll talk about that more when that begins.

 

No school on Friday . . . but why?

On Thursday, we spent some time on current events — specifically relating to the arrival of Pope Francis and the Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. We began with the reasons our school was closed, what it meant to bring an enormous number of visitors into a city already congested, and the need for heightened security.

Then we moved into a lengthy exploration of who the Pope is, where and what the Vatican is, and an overview of world religions to get some sense of how it all fits together. Math came into this, too, as we looked at a variety of pie charts showing the percentages of adherents and non-believers around the world, in the USA, and how the Roman Catholic population has changed in regions worldwide between 1910 and 2010. As always, many students were astonished to discover how small the world’s Jewish population is because their local experience has led them to think otherwise. We wrestled with the distinction between being an agnostic and an atheist. Mark, who is from Belize, told us many things about his own family background and personal experiences as we discussed what one slice in a world religion pie chart meant that was labeled “Primal Indigenous.”

And that was not everything we did this week, of course, but we have to stop somewhere.

Week of Sept. 14 — Camping, math, and more

The highlight of the week was the camping trip on Wednesday and Thursday. After a week’s delay in hopes of getting better weather, we got an amazing 48 hours of perfect conditions — hot enough to swim in the daytime, cool enough to sleep outside at night, and clear skies to see the changing stars if we woke up from time to time.

We’ll put up a more complete gallery of photos sometime soon, but here are some to give you an idea of what it was like. Our round above-ground pool lent itself to creating a whirlpool when all of the kids ran in a circle. Next to the pool is the original little building on our property, which served as a changing-room for the kids.

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The camping area was a relatively short walk from the pool and our house but far enough away to get really dark after sundown. The fire area was a gathering place for songs and conversation, cooking our dinner, roasting marshmallows and bananas and apples, and warming up in the morning. Sleeping bags were cozy places for friends to chat and share a book, but they were also a challenge to roll back up in the morning.

dinnertime night_good campfire_group packingup sleepingbag_friendsgood waking_up1

The enormous basalt rocks that fill our woods and the stream were fun to climb on, jump across, and even imagine as the site of a bear’s cave (complete with the bear inside).

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But finally it was time to go back to school, so we took one more photo of the whole group on one of the biggest rocks near our house.

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Thanks go to the parents who drove, cooked, stayed over, watched the pool, and made it all possible. We’ll do it again in June, when it will all be the same and all be different.

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Math has involved a range of activities as we have started to understand our individual students’ skills, interests, and working styles. We continued with Cuisenaire rods to do a bit with surface area, cutting centimeter graph paper to make “jackets” for rods of different sizes. We looked for patterns and tried to generalize some rules. There were questions. How many different patterns will cover the little rod that is a cube? Why did the surface area increase by 4 with each longer rod? Can you prove your idea on the physical piece of wood? Can we figure out the surface area of a rod that is larger than any in the set of 10 that we are using?

rod_jackets3 rod_jackets2

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In preparation for our start of bridge building and bridge research next week, we asked students to create a slide show using Google Presentations to teach us all about an animal that interested them. We expect to finish them up and share them in the upcoming week, when we’ll also organize our construction partnerships and begin working on designing a toothpick bridge.

Stay tuned for more about that next week, along with news of how our first lunch sale went.

The First Week of School — Sept. 8

Our group of 17 fifth and sixth graders got off to a good, if hot, start. The weather was oppressively warm and humid for the first several days, but it didn’t keep the kids from playing running games all over the campus. The fifth graders, especially, were enjoying their new boundaries, which included even the distant and magical bamboo forest!

In the middle of the week, a problem arose — the fourth graders (who could now play as far as the lower field) wanted to be part of all-campus tag, but they couldn’t go as far as the older students. What to do? Our group had an excellent, thoughtful discussion of the problem in which they considered the fourth graders’ feelings and wishes as well as their own.  Good questions came up. Why do the fourth graders have smaller boundaries? What if some third graders wanted to play? It’s all yet to be resolved, but the indications are that it will work out well.

We spent a lot of time getting ready for our bridge study. We got going with the Bridge Designer software, and we did a little hands-on exploration to affirm the stability of triangles and the instability of rectangles. That led to some better bridge designs later in the day!

bridgegirl

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We also started working on the skills required to draw a 3D plan in 2D ways — top view, side view, and end view. There is a wonderful activity that uses Cuisenaire rods to teach the concepts, and we soon had students trying to replicate simple structures and find the perspective they needed.

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And we got started reading Beowulf. The school library has a wonderful version retold by Robert Nye, just gruesome enough to be enjoyable, with some excellent use of language. We’ve put several other versions out for students to explore as they wish, along with some resources about the Anglo-Saxons and the Sutton Hoo ship burial. We’ll do some map work focused on Scandinavia next week.

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There was much more, including a LOT of organizing of things — binders, math supplies, check-in routines, and on and on. Check back next week to learn about our camping trip!