Week 27 -- Cover your cough, wash your hands

Checking on the tulips that we planted earlier this year

As I’m sure you’re aware, our class has been ravaged by illness for the last two weeks, making the daily taking of the attendance a somber affair. Happily, we have plenty of ongoing project work that lends itself well to independent and small group work.

Week 17 -- Mr. Thomas Jefferson and the Forehead Game.

We began 2017 with a visit from an especially distinguished guest speaker, Mr. Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State, and the third President of the United States of America. We had an informal and wide-ranging conversation with Mr. Jefferson, learning about what schooling was like in his day, what he did in his leisure time, and a bit about his on-again/off-again friendship with fellow founding father John Adams.

Week Four: POP X, magical items, masters and beginners, and hand feeding butterflies

This week we took an impromptu field trip this week, traveling to downtown Ann Arbor’s Liberty Plaza to visit POP X, an art installation. Students explored the exhibits in trios, making note of what intrigued them, then returned to school and designed their own exhibits in the spirit of what they saw.

Week Three -- Tigers, monarchs, ethnography, and Farkle

A monarch emerges during Math class. 

Our third week of school has been regularly punctuated by excited cries as caterpillars began pupating (ask your child), and later as butterflies emerged. With Lisa’s guidance, we’ve begun tagging our monarchs with tracking stickers, then releasing them back into the wild. If all goes well, we should be releasing several more in the next week or two. We also began reading a book together as a class called The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo. We’re doing a close read of this novel, taking time to think and talk about the craft of the writing and the intent of the author. We’ve also continued learning about the Yanomami tribe of South America, and got to have a lively conversation with an actual ethnographer who came to speak to the entire 5/6 about her work. In our writing journals, we explored the question, "What is the best way to talk to someone with different political beliefs?” It’s a question that I’m sure we’ll be coming back to regularly in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

Week One -- Yanomami, magic, milkweed, and monarchs

We began our year by exploring the difficulty in remaining objective when learning about something new. To illustrate this, we delved into Napoleon Chagnon’s infamous field work with the Yanomami tribes of the Amazon rainforest. How can one accurately study a culture that is entirely different than the one that they were raised in? Was his study ethical? Are his findings biased? Closer to home, what biases do we bring to our current political debate?

Math: assorted recent topics

As discussed in a previous post, the Singapore Math books serve as a backbone of our math curriculum. It is largely an individually-paced program (though small cohorts often form and work together), allowing students to progress at a rate that makes sense for each topic. We have Math class four times a week, and we generally devote one or two sessions to Singapore work, which allows for questions, small group break-out sessions, and targeted group lessons. 

With the rest of our class time, we do a variety of activities that benefit the entire group, regardless of where they happen to be in their particular math books. In this post, I wanted to share a few of the things we've done in recent weeks apart from Singapore work.