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.

If you’re wondering why you didn’t hear about such a momentous visit on the news, or at least on the car ride home from school, it’s probably because it was only me portraying the man, doing my best to accurately portray Jefferson based on what I’ve learned about his life and times. It was our introduction to Place Out of Time (also known as “POOT.” Get used to hearing that term. You’ll be hearing it a lot in the weeks ahead), which is an annual middle school project in which students research and portray a notable figure in a series of in-class and online conversations. It’s a fun and intensive project, and the 5/6s have spent much of the week compiling a list of three different figures who they’d be interested in portraying.

Much of our week was devoted to this assignment (take a look at the assignment here), which was scaffolded with mini-lessons on internet research, the differences between primary and secondary sources, and a host of short conversations about various famous and infamous characters throughout history that kids are considering portraying.

In Math, we introduced two games geared toward practicing our basic math facts. One is called ‘Beat the Calculator,’ in which two students tackle the same problem, one using paper and pencil, and the other using a calculator. The other is called… The Forehead Game, which is a terrible name for it, but it’s fun to play. It’s easier to see it in action than to describe it, so take a look at the video below from my math group last year. We also spent two day working in our Singapore books.