Week of February 22 – 24: Life Skills 101

When teachers arrive at Miquon, they often bring wonderful new ideas that are likely to keep going, at least for a while, after those teachers move on. “Life Skills 101” is a multi-week activity that began in Erica’s 5th/6th grade classroom some years ago. Students are asked to consult with their family and come up with a three-week plan in which they will learn a new skill that is likely to be useful in their later lives when they are living independently. Sometimes they already have the beginnings of that skill but plan to improve it significantly. They keep a weekly journal of their activities and also a chart on which they record the time spent each day. Some students choose a task that they work on several days each week; others may work only on weekends. At the end of the time, we ask them to give us a brief presentation — a talk, a slide show, a demonstration, or whatever seems appropriate and interesting.

This year, as in previous years, students selected many different things as their life skill. Family members were often quite involved in teaching skills and providing supplies and transportation, which we appreciate very much. Five students worked on house-cleaning in some form. Bathroom cleaning was decidedly unpopular but acknowledged as necessary. One chose to clean and de-clutter his room in anticipation of having his house go up for sale, and he also worked on designing the room he hopes to have in his new home. Six students chose cooking. One of those noted that he was specializing in learning the kinds of things he will want to eat when he is away at college “because my father won’t be able to drive there and cook for me every day.” One student painted her young cousin’s bedroom, working with her grandfather as her mentor. Another student decided to learn to travel independently to several useful destinations, taking on the challenges of dealing with buses and trains as well as using an app to track the schedules of both. A couple of students learned to do the laundry. One remarked that he not only learned to fold but also put his own clothing away for the first time. One learned to plan meals,  set a spending limit, make a shopping list, and go to the store for what was needed.

When students made their presentations, we talked about some of their insights and opinions as well as their skills. Ones who had tackled a very messy room observed that it would be much less of a job to keep things neat and clean now that the big cleanup was over. Several spoke of enjoying time spent with family members as they learned from them. Several expressed new-found appreciation for the time and effort that their parents spent when they were tackling these jobs. Many thought they would go on doing these things because they could see how important they were to family life.

The presentations were uneven, but we could see progress in many ways. All of our students talked to their audience instead of reading from the screen or from a detailed page of text that they had prepared. The slide shows that some students chose to create were highly visual and served as a structure for their talk without having many (or, in some cases) any words. Some had organized their talk well, telling us without any prompting what they chose and why, what they did during the three weeks, and what they learned in the way of new skills and perhaps some new insights.

We could also see that there is still some work to do. It was obvious that some students had not reviewed their journals carefully (or at all) to remind them of some of the details of their activities. Some had not practiced their talk aloud and found themselves groping for language and fluency. One had photos of his efforts but didn’t know how to get them into his slide show and didn’t ask for help. Some had forgotten that there was a presentation expected, even though a note about it was written at the bottom of their daily time sheet and should also have been recorded in their student planner when the project began.

We reminded everyone that there was at least one more presentation in our plans before we will have reached the end of the year, which is their personal project. That self-selected learning activity takes place in the month of May and, like Life Skills 101, is shared at the end with their classmates. Students were urged to think about what went well with the presentations we just completed, in their own sharing and/or those of some classmates, and what would need more thought and preparation next time. Our emphasis was on learning from this experience and using that learning to move forward. We expect to see many wonderful presentations when the personal project ends, based on the growth that we were able to observe this time around.

Week of February 13: Changes and Choices

One of the professional pleasures of working at Miquon is that teachers are not locked into a rigid curriculum that remains the same, year after year. Although the learning goals are well-established, the ways those goals may be reached are flexible, are likely to change from year to year for many different reasons, and are under constant evaluation by individual teachers, teaching partners, and the staff as a whole.

One of the core programs in the fifth/sixth grade groups is one we call Changes and Choices. This program includes making healthy choices of many different kinds (including diet, drug and alcohol use, smoking, and peer pressure); navigating the social and informational world online; and understanding the changes that are a part of puberty. This year, we decided to do the program in a very different way.

In prior years, we have often worked on Digital Citizenship as a separate topic. Students have learned about engaging with social media, doing internet research efficiently and wisely, considering ways to protect their own identity and privacy, and dealing with personal safety and cyber-bullying. Changes and Choices generally encompassed the rest of the topics listed above. These explorations have usually spanned several weeks and have been done along with the rest of our program and the specialists’ classes.

This year, at Diane’s suggestion, we decided to try a different format. We put all of our other topics on hold (including those of the specialists) and spent all four days of this past week on Changes and Choices. We divided the topics into three major parts:

  • Digital Citizenship (1 day) — led by Mark and assisted by Jeri
  • Healthy Choices (1 day) — led by Jeri and assisted by Mark
  • Human Development (2 days) — led by Diane and Lynn

We blended and then divided our 31 students into four groups. Two pairs of groups stayed together throughout the week, rotating through those three topics. During the week before, students had the 3-part program explained to them. Then they were asked to write on a slip of paper any topics or questions that they hoped we would explore and drop them into our 3 collection boxes. Teachers later looked at those papers and made adjustments to their plans in order to incorporate as many of those wishes as possible.

Although the first two topics listed above were done in ways similar to our past practice, Human Development was initially intended to take us from conception to death. As we planned our time and activities, however, it became clear that we were not going to have enough time to explore death and dying, although it was clearly a subject that interested many of our students. We will take that topic up before the end of the year, but it could not be fitted into the four days that we had.

All four teachers wrote a summary of each day’s activities and included some general notes about students’ engagement with them. Those summaries were shared with parents at the end of each day. Parents were urged to continue the topics in conversations at home.

Below are some excerpts from those daily summaries. Because the conversations were greatly shaped by the students’ questions and degree of interest throughout each day, not every group had precisely the same experience with each topic. The excerpts represent what some families received; others got slightly different descriptions.

From Jeri (Healthy Choices): Today, our group worked on learning to make healthy choices on a daily basis and in life in general. There were several activities and lots of group conversations in each.

We started the day in half groups. Mark worked with a group doing with an online activity, “All Systems Go” and its worksheet. This helped the kids learn to identify the various parts and systems of the human body. The other half group took a close look at information about nutrition and exercise. Specifically, what should be included in a balanced diet, and how much exercise should kids get every day? We also looked at sugar and its effect on the brain and body, how the labels can be tricky to understand, and how sitting too long is bad for you. The kids were really surprised to learn how much sugar is in so many products and also that sitting too long has so many bad effects on your body.

The mid-section of the day focused on a variety of drugs and their effects on the brain and other parts of the body. Together we walked through an online activity, Drugs and Your Body. This activity includes information about the effects of abusing drugs such as tobacco, cocaine, methamphetamine, steroids and vaping. It goes through the effects on six different body parts – the brain, skin, lungs, mouth, heart –  and how they can lead to death. This activity was particularly shocking to the kids and grossed them out a bit. We also noted that not all drugs are bad, such as aspirin, but that they all need to be used cautiously and on short term, unless prescribed by a doctor.

In the last portion of the day, we focused on friendships and peer pressure, both good and bad.  The kids were asked to describe each and we talked through a few examples. A few of the kids acted out different scenarios that demonstrated both good and bad peer pressure situations. And finally, each child completed a “Decisions, Decisions” sheet, on which they ranked the values they hold and goals they aspire to, identifying ones that could not be swayed by friends and other peers.

From Mark (Digital Citizenship):  Today we started our morning with “Digital Life 101” from commonsensemedia.org, where we learned about the ways digital media fits into our everyday lives. We explored the 24/7, social nature of digital media. We began simply with what is media and how does it differ from digital media? We investigated our digital lives by questioning the way we communicate with and share with others over digital media. Because we’re connected in a more social and interactive way these days, we discussed online relationships and how to navigate them safely. We talked about ethical and appropriate ways to communicate online. We gave our students some tools to communicate effectively, avoid misunderstandings, represent themselves in a professional and thoughtful way, and engage respectfully when interacting with other online users. We ended our afternoon with robust debates about how to judge the intentions and impact of people’s words and actions online. We talked about ways to remain safe when online relationships turn into inappropriate online behavior and crosses the line into cyber-bullying.

From Diane (Human Development, day 1): Today’s work began with an animated conversation about the nature of development — how it happens in stages, how age boundaries on those stages are approximate, how it suggests growth that occurs across the lifespan, and how aging is something that can be understood to be happening from the beginning of our lives. Development also exists on many planes at once — physical, cognitive/language, and social/emotional.

We watched video clips of a 6 week old and then of a 21 month old child and observed for development in each of the areas above (physical, cognitive, emotional/social). We noted the clear and demonstrated development that was visible and connected it to other observations or experiences we had in our lives. The kids were astute observers and made reasonable inferences about what they noticed. We also briefly noted and roughly ordered a variety of developmental milestones. We talked about all of this as giving us insight (and therefore sympathy or even empathy) into others. The children then spent ten or fifteen minutes examining a chart of developmental milestones and descriptors for 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 year olds taken from the book Yardsticks by Chip Wood. They were encouraged to find themselves reflected in those descriptions and to appreciate how their uneven development can mean they are on several charts at once. Attached to those sheets was a growth chart — the type one would see in a pediatrician’s office — and many of the children chose to chart their height on the chart. Tellingly, few charted their weight.

Every child then had an opportunity to observe a child in the nursery or kindergarten for  a short time, looking for development in those areas again. While those observations were happening, the other students were reading about the developmental milestones of particular age ranges (birth through age 5). Using that information, they drew outlines of appropriately-sized children and, with a partner, labeled those milestones in relevant places on the drawings (such as putting walking on the legs or feet). Those drawn and labeled figures were then hanging around us as we reconvened for a review of the morning and what we had learned/observed.

The afternoon was filled with work in gender-separated groups about the developmental stages in which these children find themselves, focusing specifically on the nature and challenges of puberty. Mark met with the boys and Diane with the girls.  (Lynn assisted Jeri, since Mark was needed for the boys’ meeting.) Both groups had open, free-ranging discussions as they learned about the body changes that puberty brings (to both boys and girls), about the reproductive system of men and women, and much more. Parents were sent a more detailed account of what their child’s discussion group asked about and explored, as the meetings were not identical in content.

Lynn (Human Development, day 2): Today Diane and I completed our 2-day study of Human Development with your child. We started with a teacher-created game show that we titled “More on Puberty and What Lies Beyond.” As students played the first part of the game in small teams, they learned about changes during puberty and adolescence that were not about sex and reproduction, such as growth spurts, cognitive maturation, and possibly needing eyeglasses. The second part of the game was about physical, cognitive, and emotional changes and experiences that are characteristic of the many stages of adulthood. These included strength and mobility gains and losses, career and family decisions, and changing financial obligations, among other things.

We watched “Life’s Greatest Miracle” from PBS, the amazing story of a child’s journey from conception to birth, featuring the amazing photography of Lennart Nilsson. Students asked some good questions afterward.  We talked briefly about the many ways that a child might enter a family (including ways that were chosen because of fertility issues, being a single parent, or being a same-sex couple — adoption, surrogate mothers, in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, etc.).

We spent about 45 minutes talking with Tony Hughes, Diane’s mother-in-law, Betsie, and her father-in law, Richard, about getting older. Students had generated questions and topics for them last week, and we had a very good conversation today about many different aspects of aging.

Finally, we looked at Thomas Armstrong’s concept of 12 Stages of Life and the “gifts” that come with each. There were a lot of good vocabulary discussions as students tried to figure out such words as benevolence, ingenuity, and enterprise. Children tried to pair the stages and gifts on their own, then got an explanatory handout of his view, and created a mobile with 3 by 5 cards.

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All four of us will meet soon to review how the revised program went, make sure the resources and activities are clearly described and annotated for use in future years, and consider adjustments to the format and time frame. We will also make sure that death and dying will be explored before the year is over.

February 5: Analog Clocks — We need them in the classroom and at home

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

An article appeared in the NY Times Review of Books recently: “Pause! We Can Go Back!”   It discusses a book by David Sax called The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. The analog examples cited in the review did not include clocks, but I hope they are discussed in the book. At some point, I plan to read it and find out . . . when I have the time.

Diane and I have talked about the value of analog clocks off and on for several years. The conversation was intensified this year by a workshop she attended that encouraged teachers to help students learn to manage time by understanding it better in a spatial sense.

In the blog entry for November 14 (part 1), I wrote about our children’s understanding of time in connection with the Terra Nova testing that we were doing. Below is most of that essay, reprinted here because the book review got me thinking about it again. It continues to seem like an important part of every child’s education, one that may be getting overlooked.

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Because so many of [our students] are surrounded by digital clocks and wristwatches, they have not developed a visual/spatial grasp of the units of time or the passage of time. I said on Friday that we were changing to a different activity at “a quarter to twelve.” I heard one student turn to another and ask, “What’s a quarter to?”

Every classroom at Miquon has at least one analog clock. To what is it analogous? To the circular nature of time and the infinite number of units that exist between the hours, minutes, and seconds that are marked on the face. A digital timepiece jumps from one unit to another — however small and precise its numbers may be — skipping the endless number of fractional parts in between its programmed units. An analog clock’s hands move smoothly around the circle, touching all of the infinite number of fractions between, for example, 3:04:27 and 3:04:28. It models the continuous rate of change that is part of the nature of time.

An analog clock gives us a visual representation not only of what time it is now but also what time it was and what time it will be. It is [also] a pie chart that shows the customary fractions of an hour that we reference when we speak of quarter after, half past, and quarter to. A digital clock displays a single, constantly changing set of numbers in isolation. It’s an entirely different and very sparse way of communicating about time.

This year, we did something new and very successful during the Terra Nova testing. Diane had gone to a professional development workshop that included some strategies for helping students with time management and planning. In response to what she learned, she brought to our two classrooms four clocks that had a metal rim (something that took her most of a weekend afternoon to locate!) and a clear plastic cover on the face. The metal rim was needed to hold a magnet, and the face could be written on with a whiteboard marker. Before we started each timed sub-test, we colored in the amount of time the test allowed and placed a colorful magnet approximately at the halfway point.

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Now students could see the amount of time they had as something visual — not just a number that would come up sometime in the future.They could also readily see how close they were to the halfway point in their allotted time and compare it to where they were with the number of questions that remained. One student commented that the magnet made him anxious at first, but then it made him less stressed because he found that he was usually where he needed to be when the halfway point was reached.

In recent years, we have sometimes had a few students in fifth or sixth grade who have never learned to read what some of them call a “face clock” — something that would have been very unusual before those digital clocks came along. Learning to “tell time” from an analog clock was a skill we learned at home, along with tying our shoes . . . before the age of Velcro.

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We still need to know how to tie a knot or bow that can be easily undone, however our shoes may fasten these days, and we still need to have a deep understanding of time, despite the increasingly-digital world in which we live.

Week of Jan 30: Measuring up, down, and around

This is the first of several weeks in which we will have stepped away from our small math instruction groups that are blended with students from Diane and Jeri’s class so the two classrooms can do some different work with their whole group. In our class, the main focus is on measurement. We are working with both metric and “common” or “English” units — separately, not together. We’ve discussed and will continue to talk about the differences between the two systems, the need to memorize an arbitrary series of relationships in the English system, the base-ten organization of the metric system, and the way that metric prefixes apply  across the units that measure length, mass, and volume.

Students have all made a personal copy of a wonderful sign hanging in Diane and Jeri’s kitchen that shows the relationship among cups, pints, quarts, and gallons:

Our afternoon bingo games have focused on vocabulary and relationships. How many teaspoons in a tablespoon? What does the metric prefix “kilo” mean?

Students have also started working in the “Key to Measurement” booklets, starting with units of length. After completing one or more pretests, some are doing the metric series and some are doing the English series. In both programs, students are doing a lot of actual measuring as well as learning to convert among the units (inches to feet, for example, or centimeters to meters).

With everyone, we are doing some additional practice with fractions. Students have measured many things around the classroom using inches and have recorded those measurements as inches, feet and inches, and feet and fractions of a foot:  62 inches = 5 feet and 2 inches = 5 and 1/6 feet. This has led to some review of fractions and fraction simplification for some students who found this last step difficult.

Estimation has been part of our work as we try to help students internalize some of these measurements. For example they were asked to measure only things that they thought were more than a foot long. On Friday, before we delivered the sandwiches to classrooms, they were asked to estimate the mass of each kind of sandwich, based on their very limited experience with their alligator Gro-Beasts (explained below). A few students were able to come quite close to the actual weights, and many were right in the relationships (one sandwich being about twice as heavy as another one) even if the actual numbers were far from the mark. We’ll be doing more of this as opportunities come up.

The alligators are providing a lot of fun as well as lots of practice with measuring. Most students have named them and speak to them in a friendly way when they arrive in the morning. Some have set up partnerships to ensure that their alligator will be looked after on days one of the partners might be absent. We’ll be writing about the ‘gators this coming week.

Students started by finding the mass, girth, and length of their alligators before they went into their tubs of water. They have a folder in which to keep the records. “Girth” was a new vocabulary word for just about everyone. They also did a tracing of the outline of the alligator on graph paper and will be doing another on Monday. The next day, they repeated the measurements and also calculated the difference in the mass. We’ll be doing this daily until we are convinced that they have absorbed all of the water that they can. Then we’ll take them out of the water and track their changes as they dry out. We’ll be doing some graphing of the data, and we’ll use those graphs to interpolate and record approximate numbers for days that we did not measure, such as weekends.

On several days, as students emptied, rinsed, and refilled their tubs, we asked them to use the cup or pint containers to do the refilling and count how many it took. Again, we expect that this kind of experience will help with the internalizing of what those measurements really mean. Anything parents can do at home to provide measuring experiences of any kind — cooking, building, sewing, and the like — will add to the knowledge gained in our classroom activities.

Even our hydroponic tomato garden is getting some measurement attention. Students have been amazed by the rate at which our seedlings are growing.

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Lots of other things went in class, of course. We started literature groups that are going to meet on Thursdays for the next several weeks. After students looked at a lot of different books and indicated interest in at least three of them, we ended up with Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, Fourth World by Kate Thompson, Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, and The Wordsmith by Patricia Forde. Vocabulary and syllabication will be part of our work along with discussions of the novels themselves.

Our study of Ireland has passed through the Bronze Age and brought us to the Celts. Students are enjoying developing their skills with a board game commonly called brandubh. Is what we are playing a truly authentic version of this ancient pastime? Probably not, but it is likely to be reasonably close to the game as it continued to evolve and be played in more recent times for which we do have some written references.

The start of Donald Trump’s presidency has given us a lot to explore as we use it to continue our year-long involvement with the Constitution, the structure of our 3-part federal government, and current events. We have looked into executive orders (a practice that goes back to George Washington), including the one issued by Franklin Roosevelt that forced people living on the West Coast who had even a small amount of Japanese ancestry into internment camps during World War II. (Students know that this will be our final topic for the year in our exploration of migration and immigration.) We will be finding out more about the Supreme Court and the ways justices apply and interpret the Constitution during the coming week of school. These are, indeed, interesting times.

And as all of our parents know, we began our 3-week adventure with “Life Skills 101.” We’ll share more about that next week.