Spring Big Circle

On Friday the Red Fox Clan led the school in the welcoming of spring. The other clans were led through a sense meditation, looking for signs of spring/tracking and a game or two. Adults who participated shared so highly of the abilities of the children to facilitate activities for people of all ages. Check out the pictures for a visual report!

Patterns of Control and Division

This week among other things we are stepping back and taking a bird's eye view of our country's history from 1492 - 1870's. Students have read vasty different perspectives of the same stories, noticing omissions and varying motives of the story tellers. Students have expressed discontent of reading the same thing over and over again: one group gaining power and wealth at the expense of many. We all seem to be active creators in our society and individual lives. So we begin asking ourselves, "How should things have been over the first 400 years of our country?" And, "Why has history deviated from how it could have been?" Specifically we are looking for patterns of control and division in our country. We will search for these patterns not only as we progress chronologically in our country's history, but also within our selves. Driven by profits and power, millions (billions around the world) lead lives of great struggle and suffering. If we are driven by profits (money and getting our own way?) and power in our own internal worlds, what parts of ourselves are left struggling and suffering? What could things be like in our lives if we become skilled at observing how we create division in ourselves and subsequently acting to address such creations? We will work to segue this into individual projects in which students will observe their thinking and self talk and practice interrupting behaviors that are unbeneficial.

Spring!

As the earth continues to evolve under us, we came across an interesting article for you to check out: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/03/02/chile.quake/index.html?hpt=Mid

Another interesting and short article on the hypothesis of the expanding earth (thanks Eric) to check out: http://www.geologynet.com/tectonics1.htm

We have not spoken about the expanding earth hypthesis at school, so it might be interesting for you to introduce it to your child(ren) to fuel the investigation of geology happening everywhere.

We continue to be in full swing, from students taking part in revision/editing meetings with each other to running their own book group discussions. Investigations in math include geometry, percent/ratio/proportion and probability. Students continue to make headway on their earthquake reports, now working on illustrations. We hope to have these published around Open House/Author's Tea time in our effort to raise some funds for those struggling in Haiti and Chile.

Trial, Earthquakes, Essays and more

We had another successful trial chalk full with critical questions and answers. Three groups (the poor, wealthy elite and the British) were charged with the mistreatment, suffering and deaths of thousands of men, women and children. The British (Faolan, Will and Finn with lovely British accents) were accused with focusing purely on profit and being undiplomatic. The Poor (Milo, Peyton and Raven) were accused with allowing the minority wealthy elite to manipulate them into fighting a war and not uniting to change the terrible living conditions underwhich they lived. The Wealthy elite (Jesse, Isaac and Kiva) were charged with things such as fueling racism to divide people so that they could stay in control. Also, the elite were charged with writing the Constitution with the interests only of the wealthy in mind. Our prosecuter/judges (Iona, Ben and Rasulan), with the aid of Ariel and a visiting Elizabeth Downes, assigned responsibility to all the groups, finding the wealthy elite as having more responsibility than the other groups.

Students have been interacting with resources on earthquakes, taking notes on a wide variety of topics. They took detailed (and not so detailed) notes and are going through the process of writing topic sentences, determining how to organize their facts, and writing reports. While writing, students are seeing that the quality of notes they took are having a big impact on their ability to retell facts.

More writing... this morning Faolan and Ben led two peer editing groups. The kids have been working on 5 paragraph essays, responding to questions inspired by their bookgroup book (Three Cups of Tea and The Giver). The focus of the groups were revising their supporting details to be more clear and powerful. Every student listened and gave thoughtful feedback with no adult prompting. On the flip side, every student shared their writing and made changes in several places. Beyond revision, minilessons were taught on introductions, conclusions, and how to present one's ideas in the most persuasive ways. Students are having more conversations about writing and subsequently I am reading great progress.

Revolutionary War Trial Preparations begin

Prosecutors, British representatives, rich colonial elite representatives and the representatives of the poor majority of colonists began meeting today in preparation for a trial. Each group is being charged with the suffering and deaths of thousands of men, women and children before, during and after the Revolutionary War. Each group will defend themselves during prosecution. Stay tuned for frequent updates.

Solstice and More

Hello Blog, it's been too long.

Our big project with Flying Deer this fall culminated in making delicious acorn flour and selling it at the Holiday Fair. We spent a great deal of time documenting our work and calculated that it took 3 hours to make each cup of flour! Students worked together to make a brochure that described the process, classification, identification of oak trees, and how to use acorn flour.

We continued our study American history up to the Revolutionary War. To help us gain greater understanding of the time period, we utilized historical fiction. Students read My Brother Sam is Dead and Johnny Tremain as bookgroup books. While learning about what it could have been like for children and their families during the war, students focused on vocabulary and taking a greater lead in discussions. Two book groups began today, Three Cups of Tea and The Giver. Both have powerful messages for us.

We are beginning our exploration of plate tectonics and the physical structure of the earth. Beginning with the earth's layers, we'll move to convergent and divergent boundaries and all of the fascinating earth processes that arise (haha).

Early November Update

From Columbus, we have moved on to getting a sense of how many other explorers from other countries "discovered" and "claimed" new lands. Students split up a chapter and taught their peers through a variety of means, including acting explorations and scenes out, writing songs, and teaching with the use of questions and answers. The motives of the explorers and those who funded them seemed like a broken record: profit and fame along with a great deal of neglect around the impact on Native Americans.

As a part of our lessons on reading nonfiction, students continued to practice pre-reading and were introduced to outlines. Together we filled in an outline about the beginning colonies stretching from the French in Canada down to the Spanish colonies in Mexico and Central America. This week students are independently completing a basic outline (fill in the blanks) while reading about the 13 Colonies.

Barely mentioned in the textbook are details about the Colonist-Native American interaction. We will be beginning three book groups, reading Sign of the Beaver, Indian Captive, and The Birchbark House. While gaining better understanding of the meeting of different cultures, we will read and answer questions with the aid of Bloom's Taxonomy, practice question generating and engage in discussions. Students will have the opportunity to read two of the above mentioned books.

We read Zinn's perspective on the birth of racism in America. He posed the question, "Is racism natural?" and proceeded to support his claim that it isn't a born instinct. Students reflected on this question and discussed Zinn's claim that racism in America was fueled by a "frenzy for limitless profit" and "racial hatred." Out of a discussion came the connection that this "frenzy for limitless profit" seems to be having a negative impact on things today, including the ecosystem.

Students took their Columbus Critiques entirely through the writing process, revising, editing, and then typing. They just scored their critiques using a rubric, focusing on Ideas, Organization, Sentence Fluency, Voice and Conventions. They will refer back to this piece as they continue to write and improve at the traits of writing. Our focus in writing will now shift to reading responses, reflections, prompts and some semblance of book reports.

As you saw in your child's goal setting conference, the three math groups have covered a lot of material so far. One group has just completed investigating integers and is moving on to linear equations and functions, while the others are in the midst of powers/exponents/order of operations and multiplication facts.

Spelling units, nature journal entries and an experiential lesson on the environmental impacts of industry/town zoning are among our many other endeavors. New pictures will be up soon on picasa, check them out!