The Rookery

Imagine - Starting With the Child

This November 7, Prairie Creek is hosting a conference for like-minded educators from all over the country.  The conference focus is on child-centered practices and social justice.  I'll be presenting a workshop on creating a Makers program - we'll have many more workshops, a panel discussion and an open space session.  If you're an educator, we hope you'll join us.  If you know educators who might be interested, please tell them about the conference.  More information and a registration link can be found at our conference website.

The Politics of the Classroom

Today the Herons had a very serious conversation about being a citizen.  We needed to talk because this year's presidential election had become a topic of discussion - but not in a productive way.  Students were declaring sides and they were belittling others' views.  It wasn't happening during class time but during down time like lunch and extended, when conversations wander and teachers aren't always right there to guide.  So I needed to find a way to help the Herons rise to civil discourse all of the time, and not just when I was there.

But how?  This election has been, by many accounts, one of the most divisive in history.  How can our students rise above a tide that even adults have found difficult to resist?  I thought about it all weekend.

I began with a history lesson - what democracy is, how it came to be the form of government we have, and some of the elements that a democracy needs such as informed voters and freedom of speech.  We talked about the amazing achievement of over two hundred years of peaceful transfer of power (and the remarkable example George Washington set for future presidents in his farewell address.)  And I shared the current tradition of the outgoing president to leave a letter on the desk of the oval office for the incoming president. (Which many Herons thought was very nice.)

So far so good.  We then shifted to talk a little more about freedom of speech and the right of people to have their own opinions.  How can we ensure that people feel safe to share their ideas?  We talked about the work of the majority to protect the voice of the minority.  We talked about how important it was to value deep and careful speech - to ask questions of those whose ideas we don't agree with and strive to understand their thoughts.  We don't have to agree.  Indeed, sometimes, the best way to counter an argument is to truly understand it.  But we need to have those conversations and debates respectfully and with a mind that is seeking to understand.

I used a metaphor that seemed to resonate for the class: when we weave, we need weft strings and warp strings - but they need to connect and come in contact with each other.  They must interact in order for us to create a strong fabric.  If you have some strings going one way and other strings going the other but they never touch, you don't have fabric.  That's why we need to talk to people we don't think we agree with.  That's why we need to ask them to explain and seek to understand.

We made a brief foray from the historical and into current events and it became clear that the Herons had been doing a lot of thinking and worrying.  Many expressed concerns about what they had heard would happen if one candidate or the other became the president.  Many said that they had heard "rumors" and didn't know exactly what each candidate stood for.  Many seemed really scared.

I was reminded of a story my husband had told me about an election when he was about eight.  The candidate his parents supported hadn't won and the day after the election he stood at the bus stop convinced that nuclear war would begin while he was at school.  The Herons nodded - these feelings weren't too far from some of their own.

I decided to return to the civics lesson and the peaceful transfer of power idea.  The day after the election would be a Wednesday - and the Herons would have school just like we always do with reading and math and theme (and yes, lunch, we won't forget lunch.)  I talked about the three branches of government and how the president is just one part and the other two parts share equal power.  It was reassuring to the Herons to know that there was a balance - and that our government was designed to keep any one person from having too much power.

The Herons shared some ways they wanted to support civil debates at school (or, as they called it, friendly arguments.)  They seemed really committed to being aware of how they presented their ideas and how they found out about others' ideas.  I asked them to watch out and intervene if they saw kids who hadn't learned about this yet.

It was the first conversation of what, I know, will be many, but I left it really hopeful.  In the coming weeks, we'll be getting gourds and running our own election with two political parties, the Poligourds and the Free Gourds.  Each party has its own gourd-centric political platform.  It's a way to explore the dynamics of the election in a non-partisan way.

Today's conversation with the Herons reminded me how hard our children are trying to understand the world around them.  But their understanding is imperfect and they are not yet equipped to sort through rhetoric and hyperbole.  They need our help and they need us to model for them what it means to be respectful, informed citizens.

Sun Spotting, Archery and Whitling

The Herons around our sun marker.

On Tuesday, we tracked the sun a day ahead of the autumnal equinox (which was cloudy).  Having tangible experience with the sun's movement helps students begin to comprehend the reason for our seasonal changes.  We'll get out again close to the winter solstice and again in the spring.  It's only with repeated observations that students can begin to shift their conceptions of why we have the seasons.  Many were astonished that we are actually slightly closer to the sun during our winter -- it's the reduced number of hours of sun and the extreme angle of the sun that change our climate in the winter.  When we track the sun in December, this will begin to make more sense.  Look around your yard and see if there's a marker you can use to track the sun's travels through the season (of course, it's us traveling, not the sun...).  For us, it's the fact that the sun is right in our eyes as we drive down second street for the first month of school.  By December, the sun isn't even up yet.

Almost always when we're running an experiment like this, something unexpected happens.  I love these moments when I don't have an answer and we can genuinely puzzle with the students (Cathy wrote a great reflection on those moments, recently.)  We weren't able to record for the middle part of the day because of clouds, but we got some data at 1:50 when the clouds parted.  The students had already predicted where "noon" would be based on the increments we had recorded in the morning.  When we got our afternoon data, we decided to find the median point between that reading and the one an hour and fifty minutes before noon (or as close as we could figure; the rain had obscured our markings).  The middle point, we figured, would show where noon was.  But the median point was no where near our noon estimation!  Why not?!  We rechecked the math, it had been right.  The students began to realize that "noon" on the clock might not be the middle point of the day in terms of the sun?  Why not?  Some of them knew that clocks had different times in different parts of the earth...and then they talked about time zones.  It was a new concept for many and something we'll return to.

In math we are exploring decimals through the lens of the Olympics.  Students are working in a rotation with Cathy and Gabe but they began with me, looking at archery.  We reviewed what 12.2 cm (the diameter of the inner most ring on an archery target) was, breaking down the "wholes," the meaning of the decimal point and then the decimal place values.  I work with students all year to read decimals using place value.  Getting used to saying "twelve and two tenths" exposes the meaning of the numbers in a way that "twelve point two" hides the value.  Having experience with decimals beyond our monetary system is also important for students to feel comfortable with decimals.

Students then dropped markers on an archery target, measuring how far from the center their "shot" landed.  We recorded results in centimeters and millimeters, enabling many students to make discoveries about how multiplying (or dividing) a number by ten "moves" the decimal point.  For many, measuring with such precision was new.  We are also still working to tease out our two separate systems of measurement - don't get me started on feet and inches - it's a slippery understanding and students will often say something is "two inches and 4 millimeters."

Students also worked to find their maximum and minimum results.  The range of numbers (maximum minus minimum) enabled us to tell who was very consistent and who had "wild" shots.  Finally, we determined the mean (or average) of our individual data to see who was the best archer.  Several students extended their work by measuring how long it took them to say the alphabet to the nearest hundredth of a second.  This would be a great game to play at home, too, now that many of us have stop watches in our pockets.  Have your child practice reading the time as "eight and twenty-four hundredths" instead of "eight point two four."  The more practice they get the stronger their understanding and flexibility with parts of wholes.

The Herons within the circumference of the state's largest cottonwood tree.

We also had the opportunity to take the Chickadees on a tree tour.  Herons taught their Chickadees about tree identification and how to determine the age of a tree.  Teaching is a great way for the Herons to solidify their understanding and see its value to others (the Chickadees were a very interested audience.)  Simon came in to ask the Herons for advice on what to do about our ash trees.  He had heard about the emerald ash borer from our land scape crew and was concerned.  As a staff, we share what we are working on in theme frequently so that we can cross-pollinate and find genuine ways to use our learning.

We ended the week on a high note - despite the cancelled field trip.  Herons used our theme time to learn how to do some leather craft, work on journey sticks, and whittle.  These are crafts they'll be able to return to in forest school and at our rescheduled Caron Park day.  If your child has a pocket knife, this would be a good time to review your safety expectations.  I teach students how to open and close a knife safely, how to hand a knife to others safely if it's not one you can close, how to find a safe whittling position (away from others with nothing in the way of the knife if it slips).  I teach only to whittle away from the body.  Whittling, even in this basic form, is very calming for students and many enjoy taking the bark off of stick after stick after stick.

So Many Things to Share

These first weeks are always hard to write about - there's so much I want to share about just the doings in the classroom.  But all the doings have background information and whys that I also want to share.  I want you to feel as though you are a partner in your child's work but in order to do that, you have to know what they're doing at a deep level.  Thus the long blogs.  It gets better.  Mostly.

Trees Around Us

This week we learned how to use a dichotomous key to identify trees.  We began a tree map of the trees we have at Prairie Creek and are close to being ready to combine our maps to create a map of the whole property.  Interestingly, we found groups of similar trees planted close to each other...

We also learned how to approximate the age of a tree by measuring its circumference, finding its diameter and looking up the growth factor of the tree (how many years it takes to grow an inch in diameter.)  Amazingly, depending on species, that growth factor can range from two years an inch to seven years an inch.  Even more amazingly, there are trees at Prairie Creek that are well over a hundred years old!  We haven't worked with our data yet but even as we were collecting it, students were trying to figure out when and why different groups of trees were planted.  Which ones were there when the first school was built?  Which were added later and why?  We haven't talked about volunteer trees or how trees propagate themselves yet, either.

On Wednesday, we'll take the Chickadees on a tree tour and teach them about some of the trees we've learned about so far.  The Chicks are trying to pick out an "elder" tree on which to hang their hopes and dreams.

Week of Inspirational Math

Our first week of shared math began this week with a series of lessons to set the tone for our math learning this year.  Across all curricular areas but especially in math, we stress "the growth mindset."  The concept has been expanded upon in the work of Carol Dweck but, in a nutshell, it's the concept that the brain is plastic and is able to change and adapt to new learning.  Intelligence is not a fixed trait.  The brain can literally grow when it is stimulated by new ideas and, importantly, working through failure.  When we fix mistakes and learn from them, we strengthen our connection to the original learning.  The more risks we take, the more mistakes we encounter (and fix) the deeper and more lasting our learning.

More easily said than done.  As humans, we like the feeling of being good at something.  The work of learning from mistakes can feel frustrating, embarrassing, and fruitless.  So we have to counter those negative feelings with a lot of direct instruction around growth mindset, flexibility in math thinking, learning from mistakes, and taking risks to learn.  We tell kids to expect that learning is uncomfortable and, if they aren't uncomfortable, they aren't doing as much learning as they could be doing.  We also coach them to watch negative talk.  Herons learn to end the statement "I'm not good at such and such" with a "YET."

We've been watching videos about the growth mindset.  One of which, by Khan Academy, is here.  The others are by Jo Boaler who has some great material about the growth mindset and math (especially useful if you, as a parent, have math fears or think you're "not a math person.")  They are at https://www.youcubed.org  but you have to sign up to view them.

Cathy, Gabe and I have each been teaching lessons about creative math thinking and math group expectations.  At curriculum night, I shared the lesson I am teaching as an example of a low threshold, high ceiling task.  We were continuing a pattern.  Some students built it with tiles, others drew it, still others (when the pattern got too big) figured out patterns in the numbers that let them move just to numbers and not have to draw it.  Three of our paras spent their lunch time trying to figure out the formula for the series!  All learners, including myself, were engaged with the challenge and there were many different ways to be successful.  All of them involved the work of a mathematician - looking for patterns, making and testing conjectures, simplifying problems etc.

  This math is our "exploration math."  We meet for about an hour a day to explore different math themes (next week we'll be looking at decimals in the context of the Olympics.)  Children are in different groups throughout the year.  Right now, we're in our classroom groups but that will change in upcoming themes when we think it might be useful to have students working on similar skills together.

We also have "foundation math" every day we have "exploration math."  In foundation math, students are with other students who are learning similar computation skills.  We teach algorithms that enable students to do computational math correctly and efficiently.  They have built up their number sense in the earlier grades so that these algorithms (click to see videos of the algorithms) are easier to grasp and "make sense."  Much more about that later!

Reading Goals

I am wrapping up my beginning of the year assessments and we've had a lot of great discussions about reading stamina and setting reading goals.  We came up with many different kinds of goals from pacing (how many pages will you read a day?) to choosing new genres to read.  So often, students equate being a better reader with reading a thicker book.  Developmentally, that makes sense - fourth and fifth graders are still pretty concrete and bigger=harder in their minds.  However, becoming a strong reader has many different elements from stamina (sticking to that giant book) to comparing texts to visualizing to identifying themes to appreciating craft to reading with fluency to learning new vocabulary in context.  I will support students with mini-lessons and tools so they can achieve their learning goals.

Bird Buddies

We got our bird buddies on Friday.  The Herons are paired with the Doves and Egrets.  It's always fun to see the groups begin to make new connections.  My crew took the new iPads on a spin and did a photo scavenger hunt that included silly selfies (here is one student putting a disguise on her bird buddy).  Now all I have to do is figure out how to get those selfies printed!

Recess Work

The big birds received their recess jobs this week and training began.  Big Birds are trained as either game leaders, woods stewards or bird watchers.  Each group learns how to engage the younger students in play and help them solve problems.  It's important work that sets the tone and expectations for the older kids.  When we began the program about three years ago, I asked my class how many of them had had an older student be mean to them at some point at Prairie Creek.  Almost every hand went up (remember the question was, "Has an older student ever been mean to you...")  This week when I asked it, four or five hands went up.  Still more than I'd like but teaching the older kids explicitly that they have the responsibility to care for youngers and then teaching them ways to provide that care does seem to have made a difference.

 

 

 

Dichotomous Trees

Heron Dichotomous Tree

Yes or no... that was the question of the afternoon.  We set up a dichotomous key to identify any Heron by asking them a series of yes/no questions.  The first question was "Is the person a 4th grader?"  This helped us eliminate half the class.  We continued to develop questions that would eliminate half the group that was left to sort through.  Eventually, we were left with one person - our identification key had worked.

Later this week, we'll use a dichotomous key to identify trees.  There are also keys for lichen, rocks, wildflowers...it works for anything.

The logic used to develop them is wonderful, too.  Can you identify a trait that half the group shares?  Is it an objective trait or subjective?  One child suggested, "Do they have weird shoes?"  The Herons realized that "weird" was not a useful descriptive word since it was an opinion.  We also talked about how our key would only be good today since it involved clothing stripes and other things that would be different tomorrow.

A great challenge is to determine what the fewest number of questions a given group would need to get down to a single individual.

Getting to Know Us

Sometimes, you just have to take a deep breath and dive in.  As I'd planned for Forest School this summer, I'd imagined our first crystalline day outside together -- the blue sky would beckon, bird song would fill the air and a gentle breeze would stir our hair.  Instead, we got Wednesday - wet, warm, mosquitoey.  But the philosophy behind forest school is that by going out regularly, in all types of weather, students (well, humans) become more attuned to nature.  On a rainy day, you see things you'd miss on a sunny day.  So out we went.

We began by defining the expectations of outdoor learning.  It's not recess.  Students are expected to be able to come together for lessons and then work independently.  My colleague Nancy piloted outdoor learning last May and had a lot of wonderful tips to get us going in the right direction.

We explored the school grounds to establish our home base.  We found the perfect spot (by enthusiastic consensus) and I taught the students square knots, clove hitches and taut line hitches as we put up our first ridge line shelter.  We'll need a lot more practice with knots before they become automatic but I was excited to see the students working together to decipher the knot diagram I gave them for the taut line hitch.

Then we headed down Denmark Avenue to harvest reeds in the wetland across from the convenience store.  We stopped when we arrived just to listen and share what we noticed - cicadas, crickets, warbling bird calls, clicking noises, frogs, cars.  We also shared things we wondered about and what we were reminded of.  These three questions are key to the work of scientists (and readers and mathematicians):  What do you notice?  What does it make you wonder about?  What connections can you make?  I was amazed that after just thirty seconds of listening students had many wonders that we could have pursued with research projects:  how many different animals are here?  How do cicadas make their sounds?  Would we hear the same sounds if it was sunny?

We also found a beautiful black and yellow garden spider on her orb (females are huge so we knew that's what we were seeing).  

We harvested cattail reeds and discussed the guidelines for harvesting plants in nature (never in a protected area and, if harvesting is allowed, only one plant for every ten we count (a great ratio lesson!))  The reeds are drying in our shelter so we can use them next week to make floating duck toys that were made historically by Ojibwe children.

Sorting leaves on the plaza.

The next day we went out to collect leaves and sort them by type.  The Herons learned about compound leaves, simple leaves, lobed leaves and needles.  The students had great observations as we talked about leaves we had trouble categorizing.  We'll use our skills next week as we work with dichotomous keys to identify the trees on Prairie Creek's property.

Back in the classroom, the Herons analyzed several different pictographs to determine how to most effectively display their survey results.  By critically considering different representations, the students gain a much greater appreciation of what makes a "good" graph and what graphs are supposed to do.  Whenever possible, we don't teach kids one way to do something -- we have them consider approaches and then teach us the way that's best.  They then completed pictographs and are now working on their fractional and percentage circle graphs.

But wait...there's more.  The Herons also worked to define what we believe about ourselves as a group.  These guidelines will become our "rules" -- but they go far beyond the typical "raise your hand" or "clean up after yourself."  We began the work in pairs, writing 4-5 possible belief statements.  We are now working on synthesizing and broadening our initial ideas.  In the coming days, we'll have discussions that will enable us, eventually, to come to a consensus about what's important to this group of Herons.

Woo Hoo! The First Day of the Herons

I don't know if I'll ever feel calm the night (or weeks) before school starts -- but there is no better feeling than taking off on the first day of school.  The questions, the excitement, the jokes, the ideas...everything falls into place and the cogs of the classroom machine start to turn and chug.  And just like that, we're off -- busy learning, laughing, trying and becoming a class.

The Herons were very busy today.  We settled into our independent reading routine, learned how to sharpen pencils with "Carl," our new Japanese pencil sharpener (the students dubbed him Carl...), shared some of our favorite books, went outside in a pouring rain storm, began to add to our natural history collection, learned a ridiculous song about llamas, celebrated a birthday, and began to define what we believed was important about our class of Herons.

We also began collecting data about our classmates which we'll be presenting in a variety of ways.  Today students concentrated on finding a good question to ask the other Herons that wasn't binary (yes/no) and had a limited number of answers.  We'll soon know everything from the Herons' favorite pizzas to which planet they would most like to travel to.  We systematically collected answers to our questions using a class attendance sheet and, in the next few days, we'll graph our data.  Many fifth graders, who surveyed their classmates at the beginning of last year, will be ready to construct circle graphs using percentages that they figure out.  Many fourth graders will create circle graphs using fractions.  This kind of project enables each child to learn new math within a meaningful context.

One of the fifth graders asked for the opportunity to share some of his favorite things about the classroom with the fourth graders so we split up and gave tours of the more unusual features of the Herons -- many of the highlights will be a part of the scavenger hunt your child will create for you for next Tuesday's curriculum night so I don't want to give anything away here.

We also went out at recess in the rain.  We played "knee coup" a game in which you have to tap other people's knees.  The key to the game is "honorable" play in which you call yourself out rather than having someone else have to say "I tagged you!"  "Trust the truthful tagger" has long been a mainstay of Prairie Creek play but this year I'm experimenting with the wording used by Adventures in Cardboard (a Twin Cities based daycamp).  They say "Call yourself out."  I love the pro-active, personal responsibility created by shifting the focus from the tagger to the tagged.  As the Herons and I discussed -- if the tagger has to tell you you've been tagged, something has already gone wrong in the game.

Using rain soaked hair to write on our Buddah Boards

Going out in the rain was also great practice for Forest School which begins tomorrow.  Forest School is a new adventure for me...the Herons and I talked about how we were probably going to have to adjust things as we went along.  There are a lot of pieces I feel sure of and some challenges (such as the mosquito swarms) that I'm not sure how we'll tackle.  The good news is that the Herons definitely seem up for it.  One child even took off his rain coat in the middle of the down pour because he wanted to get more wet.  Gotta love it.

Here are some shots from our math data collection - I didn't have the settings right on my camera so some are blurry, my apologies!  Kids move fast.