Monday was the much anticipated Place Out of Time banquet, which finds the entire Summers-Knoll middle school traveling to the University of Michigan to meet face to face with many of the other students who have been participating in the POOT simulation. It’s always a fun trip, and we prepped for it by traveling into the S-K attic to find accents and costumes for the event. Once there, the students discussed and debated different aspects of the case with their peers in break-out groups, as well as in large, whole-group conversations. Afterward, our class was able to stay a little longer, allowing us to have an impromptu reflection conversation with the professors and college student mentors who orchestrate the whole experience. It was a highlight of an already exciting day.
Our journal prompt was student-submitted this week: What is your favorite board game and why? As always, it was interesting to read the range of responses. Some people preferred cooperative games, while others preferred competitive. Some preferred games with large groups of people, others preferred the opposite. One person noted that they liked games that required thought and set up before the game even began. This exercise led nicely into Thursday afternoon, which featured a class boardgame session. Our other writing prompt was a story starter involving a mysterious cloud island. These stories are still in the process of being developed, but the glimpses I’ve seen are promising!
In Math group, we read the first two chapters of The Number Devil, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It’s a fun and strange book in which a young student’s dreams are plagued by an odd creature who shows him some interesting curiosities in mathematics. Take, for example, the pattern formed when you multiply 11x11, and compare it to 111x111, and 1111x1111, and so on. (Try it yourself.) We also dipped into the Roman numeral system, which we will be continuing with next week.
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