Week 15 -- The Nutcracker and fiascos

It’s difficult to top the excitement of an unexpected snow day, but we did our best with the rest of our week. On Tuesday, we began reading When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead. It’s a difficult book to talk about without giving away its secrets, so suffice to say that it begins in the late 1970s in New York City, and a mystery quickly develops. We also continued group peer review sessions of our Summers-Knoll myths, practicing active listening and giving constructive feedback to one another.

On Wednesday, we entered into a fun new phase of our Into the Biome project, which was born in science class. Kids are working in teams to create their own versions of a game we enjoyed called Into the Forest, and we began creating the artwork for the games. Our room is quickly filling with renderings of wolverines, blue jays, raspberries, sea cucumbers, and more.  

On Thursday, we traveled to the Power Center in Ann Arbor to see a production of The Nutcracker (and to cheer on our classmate Rebecca, who was one of the sugar plums!). Between that and our work on the school play last week, theatrical productions have loomed large in our minds, so when we returned to school, we listened to act 1 of the Fiasco episode of This American Life while working on artwork for our games. It’s a very entertaining story that certainly puts some of the minor mistakes that we may have made in our own performances into stark perspective.

Math group was quite abbreviated this week, as we missed two sessions (one from the snow day, the other to go see The Nutcracker). The remaining two days were spent working in our Singapore books, and doing a self-audit of progress. I had each student make note of what page they were on in their books, then told them what page they had been on at the beginning of the school year. Some students were pleasantly surprised by how much progress they had made in 15 weeks of school, while others have a renewed sense of purpose in making good use of their time and energy in class. On Friday, our work period was punctuated by a fun visit from Mrs. Carpenter’s math students, who came and performed some math magic for the group.