On our very first day of Forest School we went on a mushroom hunt. I wasn't sure what we'd find - although the week before I'd found at least a few mushrooms around. Within moments, there were squeals of delight. A patch of giant mushrooms were growing under a pine, tiny ruffles attached to a bench, a circle of giant puff balls in our field...everywhere we looked there was something to marvel at. And we were off.
Teaching in a progressive school demands a leap of faith every year. There are certain things that we always learn in fourth and fifth grade - similes, multiplication, topic sentences - but those things are woven into our other learning, learning that emerges from our interests and personalities. Every class is different and I never know the precise direction we'll go. I'll admit to a knot in my stomach that first day as the kids quietly come in to the classroom. Will it work? Will we find things to wonder? WHAT IF WE DON'T?!?! But then, within a day or two, we become the Herons - a class that has never been before and won't be again.
Mushrooms
Back to those aforementioned mushrooms - we have found an amazing assortment and are working to deepen our understanding of just what mushrooms are. We've dug beneath the mushrooms to find the tangled web of mycelium that makes up the main part of the fungus. Students are amazed to see how big the mycelium can be compared to the mushroom. We've begun to formalize our ability to talk about what we're observing by creating a diagram of mushroom parts in our Blue Books. We've also worked on our nature journaling skills, slowing down to observe, wonder about what we see and connect it to what we know already. The Herons have had a ton of questions and we are beginning to do research to help us answer them, including a search for the world's biggest fungus. When we found this:
we had an opportunity to debunk an Internet myth using Snopes. Doing real life research like this together enables students to hear my "think aloud." How do we vet a source? What tells us we can trust it? These are skills we'll use throughout the year when we look for answers to our questions. We also tried to make spore prints. It completely failed. We had left all of our mushrooms overnight on the special paper we made. Students had waited patiently to do the reveal and I was projecting up to our TV so that everyone would be able to see without crowding and then...nothing! None of our mushrooms dropped spores. It was a great opportunity to talk about variables and how we might change our experiment to get different results - time, humidity, age of mushroom and type of mushroom are all things that we want to change in the future. These seemingly serendipitous lessons are the stuff of progressive ed. It's my job to see the opportunities to bring our standardized curriculum into our work in meaningful ways.
Finding Authors' Craft
In fourth and fifth grade we spend a lot of time observing while we read. How do authors do what they do? How do they create worlds? How do they teach us new things? By analyzing the tools authors use, their craft, we can become better readers and better writers. The Herons are proving to be very careful observers. So far we've learned about similes and metaphors and have found them in spades (don't worry, we'll do idioms, too) in our current read aloud Mañanaland. We've also started our collection of strong words which we call our word hoard -- a nod to Beowulf who "unlocks his word-hord" and tells about his battle with Grendel. Among our favorite words that we've found in our books so far: blasé, luxurious, gritted and phosphorescence. By celebrating great words together, students learn to slow down and ask when they encounter something new in a text. Who knows, it might be a jewel we need to add to our hoard.
Factors and Multiples
Much of our math work this year will come from the Illustrative Math curriculum. This curriculum has existed for years in the form of rich tasks that teachers developed and shared with each other. We've used elements of it at Prairie Creek for about six years. The creators received a grant to expand from the tasks to an entire curriculum including number talks and other routines that deepen students understanding of number. I've always loved the tasks because while doing them, students uncover the math for themselves instead of just being told what to do. Now, with interwoven numbertalks and conversational prompts, we are able to build a more cohesive understanding and use the math we are learning in authentic ways.
We are beginning as a class with an exploration of factors and multiples. We built rectangles to determine what areas can be created by several rectangles and which have only a single form. We are using multiples to quickly estimate and figure out the best way to parcel out objects. We are also learning about composite and prime numbers as we explore numbers we can split in many ways (composites) and numbers that can only be split one way (primes). It's a lot of new vocabulary so we spend some time talking about how to build synapses in one's brain to remember new things (it takes a lot of practice and repetition.)
Being a "Big Bird"
We have been isolated in our individual classes for over a year so we are spending a lot of time in these first weeks exploring what it means to be a "Big Bird" in the wider school. We're the big kids now. What we do is watched by the youngers and the 4/5s have a responsibility to teach the other students what it means to work to make the world a better place. It starts small by how we interact with each other. How we talk and how we listen. We are in the midst of our "Big Bird Training" in which the 4/5s talk about how they want to help younger students at recess and throughout the school day. We will be getting into our bird buddy groups regularly this year and the older students will be able to build meaningful relationships with our younger classes. I'm so excited.
We are also learning and defining what it means to be a Heron. We have written a series of statements about who we believe we are as a class (or what we aspire to be." To do that, we are using more formal discussion structures including accountable talk and consensus. Unless we all agree on a phrase, it does not make it into our final document. The final list is not really as valuable as the conversations that lead into it in which we really dissect what we mean by such things as "respect" and "kindness" and "challenge". Through these discussions, students begin to see what we hold in common as a class and we begin to become the Herons.
Whew! You've made it this far - how about some pictures (who says Prairie Creek never uses extrinsic rewards?!)