Monday was the first day for us to talk about and enjoy Hanukkah. We have several students this year who seem to be getting a very deep Jewish education, and they were able to share some things about the story that we haven’t heard before. We noted that it was not a major Jewish holy day, but, like Christmas, it had become major gift-giving time because of our materialistic American culture. A couple of students brought in dreidels, and we did some gambling that paid out from our bingo candy box. We discussed the fact that Jewish calendar was based on a different month and year cycle (and that Easter is a major Christian holy day that also moves around instead of being on a single recurring date). We’ll take note of Christmas next week and talk a bit about how it is blended with many pre-Christian winter celebrations. Kwanzaa will give us a chance to consider where holidays can come from — that they are not all thousands of years old.
Continuing the theme of world religions, we have put out a lot of our collection of books on Islam and other belief systems. This is a response to the anti-Muslim rhetoric (and aggression) that has been so much in the news lately. We’ve talked a bit about Presidential powers, the Constitution, and how social attitudes can sometimes push legal protections aside. Children have been encouraged to browse in that book collection and try to learn more about Islam and other religions. We’ll be using these books as part of our social studies work after we return from winter break and begin to learn about the foundations of Islam. We’ll find out how it began and how it spread. We’ll do some comparisons with other religions. Which ones are oldest? Where did they originate? How many people are followers of that religion today? What do some religions have in common? How might a particular religion affect a believer’s daily life, such as clothing and dietary practices?
We finished reading Animal Farm. We agreed that it was a very sad story. By the way, it has been made into an animated film at least once (way back in 1953) and should be available from several streaming sources. It might lead to some interesting discussions if you choose it for family viewing. We won’t be starting our next book until after winter break, and it will be something lighter.
We took a look (online) on Friday at the exhibits available at the Franklin Institute, where we’ll be going on Monday. In addition to the Genghis Khan exhibition, which is the reason for our trip, we will have time to see some of the other permanent exhibits. We did an informal polling of the group to find out what they are particularly interested in seeing, and it turned out to be more than we will have time to do. There is a lot of enthusiasm for a range of activities and topics. Please consider making a family excursion sometime in the future, perhaps during our winter or spring breaks. Ben Franklin would be pleased with the extent of our kids’ interest in so much of what is going on in the museum founded in his honor! We’ll be curious to see what they will be able to add to their understanding of the Mongol Empire on Monday. They have gathered a lot of information through our research, but they may encounter some contradictions as well as new facts. Historians have made major revisions to their perspectives on this influential culture.
In connection with our study of the Mongol Empire and its impact on the ancient and modern world, we are doing a computer simulation called “Ancient Empires.” Students must imagine themselves as the leaders of a city-state threatened by an invading army. Should they accept the invasion and pay homage to their leader, abandon the city and their deep attachment to it, or fight? After they consider their priorities (they chose preserving the welfare of their people as #1), they are given advice based on summaries of real historical events from their 4 advisors, who are represented by the 4 research teams. What did the poet, the trader’s daughter, the elder, and the warrior say today? As we could expect, they were divided. The group voted to migrate. We’ll see how that works out next week. Although the game is based on our computer and big screen, students are sharing a lot of oral reading of the advice and some of what is shown on the screen, so it’s an activity that supports many kinds of learning.
We took part in the international “Hour of Code” activity on Wednesday afternoon and may return to it once or twice again. We gave students a list of links to age-appropriate sites that would engage them with coding at various levels of difficulty:
https://code.org/learn
https://www.khanacademy.org/hourofcode
https://code.org/learn/beyond
https://www.codecademy.com/hour-of-code
https://scratch.mit.edu/hoc/
https://www.madewithcode.com/
They were entirely involved with the activities for the entire time — the most sustained a period of focus and on-topic conversation that we’ve seen this year! If you want to learn more about this annual event, go here: Hour of Code.
All of our math groups are learning to use the “bar modeling” technique from Singapore Math. This is not a solution method but, rather, a way of analyzing and representing a problem visually so that they can devise a solution strategy. The first step, after reading through the problem, is to write the solution statement with a blank for the missing value(s). This helps to ensure that students will end by answering the actual question, which may involve another step or two, such as rounding the calculated number or interpreting the remainder of a division problem. After that, students “chunk” the problem by reading through it again and adding parts to their model as they collect information. Below is an example of a fairly challenging problem, along with its solution. Many of our building’s 8 math groups would not be ready to do this one yet. But can you solve it without resorting to algebra?
Eighty percent of the members in a tennis club were male, and the rest were female. After 450 members left the club, the number of male members decreased by 1/4 and the number of female members decreased by 1/2. Find the total number of members in the tennis club in the beginning.
Here’s one way to represent and solve it:
We’ll cross off 1/4 of the males (2 parts) and 1/2 of the females (1 part) to show how many people left. That’s three parts gone altogether. Three parts = 450 members. One part = 450/3 or 150 members. Each part is 150 members, and there were 10 parts at the start. The original membership was 150 x 10, which equals 1,500 members.
As we said, this is not a problem that many of our students are ready to do yet, but it’s one that adult readers of this blog may find enlightening. Be sure to ask your child to explain some of the work we’re doing in class, and remind him/her to refer to completed problems if s/he is feeling stuck on ones we send for homework.
And we got started on small instructional groups for spelling and syllabication. Jen (one of our language support people) is now joining Mark and me on Tuesday mornings to help us strengthen students’ skills in those areas. A preliminary assessment helped us figure out where students were in these areas, and we are now developing lessons and games to move them forward. One of the opening activities was a game involving where words break correctly into syllables. Students discussed each word in the list, divided it, checked with the dictionary, and awarded themselves points for partitions that were correct.