Week of Dec. 14: Mongols come to an end (almost)

As we come to the start of winter break, we are nearly finished with the Mongols. Our trip to the Franklin Institute was very helpful to that study in several ways. The collection of artifacts made what our students had learned through their research more vivid. The captions on the exhibits confirmed and added to the things they had found in books and at websites.  We were able to add a very good book (about the exhibition) to our rather meager collection of resources, and students used it heavily to complete their teams’ presentations. There is a gallery of photos from the trip that Mark has put up on our class website, and I’ll try to add some others to this blog soon.

The research presentations were both informative and hilarious. Each team had to do some part of their sharing by means of a skit. Death and battle scenes were very dramatic. Having little in the way of props and costumes, our actors had to use their imaginations. At one point, we learned the fate of Genghis Khan’s sons as they were represented by 4 pencils on the floor. The illustration of men’s and women’s roles was a frozen scene of battle and housekeeping. The rest of the research was presented in several different ways. Two teams made posters, one group did a quiz, and two made crossword puzzles. By the end, all of us knew more about the Mongols.

dec21_deathbenf

dec21_gender roles

dec21_life of khan

dec21_pencils

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dec21_quiz

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We’ll complete this study during the week when we return. We’ll do some cooking. see a video of the Mongolian environment, and look at the way the Mongols are presented in a very old history textbook that we have. Has our view of the Mongols changed over 40 years or so? We’ll use that text for a similar comparison when we turn next to the foundations of Islam.

I hope everyone has a relaxing break and begins the new year with a feeling of joy and hope for the future.

 

 

Week of December 7: Dreidels, Mongols, Animal Farm, Hour of Code, and Math

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.

dreidels

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.

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:

model

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.

syllables

 

 

 

 

 

Week of November 30: Empires, Framework Writing, Gum

Note: Because this didn’t get written until Monday (Dec. 7), it includes some things that we did in class today.

Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire: We started with maps in our atlases and then did some coloring on printed maps. Where is Mongolia? What were the boundaries of the Mongol Empire at its height? A video on the internet showed us many different empires in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in chronological order, all the way to the 20th century. The Mongolian Empire was the largest of all. But many smaller empires (including ones that were older) were more well known and, in a sense, respected. Why was that? We’ll try to figure it out.

But what is an empire? With a bit of wobbling around, we ended with the important elements: it’s a unified group of different nations, tribes, cultures, and/or ethnicities under a single leader or controlling government. Unlike some other structures, an empire is not something from which you can easily resign.

We’re about to do a short simulation about an imaginary empire-building tribe. The core of the activity is the decision-making that a threatened group needs to do as the invaders are on the horizon. They’ll be getting advice from several members of their ruling council, mostly based on authentic history. Will they achieve the goals they set at the start? Or will it all go wrong?

We’ve also just organized the class into 4 teams who will be researching Mongol culture and history. The group generated a list of topics, wrestled with sorting them into logical groups, and will start their research in class tomorrow.

Framework Writing: There are 17 very different stories in the works that arise from the same very general guiding framework. Students have begun their adventures in Mexico, Ecuador, Mars, a castle, and many other real and imaginary starting points. We’re using the Sensory Detail word list (available on our homework blog) to help students create elaborated descriptions. And we’ve just started teaching/reviewing the rules for punctuating dialogue. They’ll use those lessons as they work on editing their stories for final publication.

One thing we have observed while reading these emerging rich and dramatic tales is that we still have quite a few students who are not yet automatic when it comes to starting sentences with capital letters, always capitalizing “I” when they refer to themselves, and using periods to end their sentences. This is getting a lot of teacher attention and support, as this is a writing element that we hope would be secure before the start of fifth grade.

The Great Gum Experiment:

Does chewing gum lose, gain, or keep the same mass after it’s been chewed? Does spit go into it and make it heavier? Does sugar dissolve and make it lighter? Does it matter what kind of gum it is? While Jeri and Mark were away at the annual People of Color Conference for 3 days, we couldn’t have our usual blended math groups. This experiment was what we did instead.

First, students had to figure out how to do the testing. They decided to weigh the gum after each minute of chewing for a total of 3 minutes. We went over the meaning of “tare” so that they would understand why we were factoring out the mass of the paper cups that held their gum on the scale. After all of the data was gathered, we could see that all three kinds of gum had lost mass: bubble gum, Juicy Fruit sticks, and sugar-free Trident. We calculated the fraction that had been lost from the entire amount that had been chewed and converted that to a percentage. (Because the students’ results were so similar, there was no reason to average their numbers.) The students who couldn’t chew gum because of their braces and retainers collected the data on a spreadsheet and used a stopwatch to time the chewing intervals.

chew1

gumrecord_1

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Finally, each student made a line graph that tracked the reduction in mass for each kind of gum, color-coding it. We discussed the idea of interpolation: that we could come up with an approximate mass for the gum at intervals for which we didn’t weigh it by using the lines that connect the data points for the actual measurements. We all agreed it was a delicious way to learn some math.