Week 6 -- Milkweed hunt, rising tigers, and graphing caterpillars

Scenes from a milkweed scouting mission

We finished reading The Tiger Rising this week, analyzing its rich figurative language (we’ve been focusing on metaphor and personification), as well as the author’s use of parallels and imagery. We’ve discussed the book extensively as a group throughout our reading, and now students are reflecting on it individually through a series of questions. We also had opportunity to sample some novels individually this week. I gave very brief introductions to about a dozen novels that the class was unfamiliar with, then they each picked one and read it for about thirty minutes. Afterwards, they wrote a quick review of their thoughts on it, indicating if they might like to continue reading it, or move along to something else next time. (Ask your child what they sampled and how they felt about it!)

Our journal writing prompt this week is “do you enjoy sharing your writing with other people?” As you might imagine, opinions vary. Another writing prompt this week was “describe a day in class from the teacher’s point of view,” which has given them all a chance at expressing some empathy for their teacher. Through it, I’ve learned that they have some strange ideas about what I actually think from moment to moment.

We also returned to reading Napoleon Chagnon’s Yanomamo: The Fierce People, which always leads to rich discussions about how complicated it is to examine a culture that is very different from your own. The class delighted in hearing how the Yanomami subverted Chagnon’s attempt to create detailed genealogies of the villages he visited. Ask your child why they didn’t want to help, and how they tricked him. It’s a pretty good story.

In math, our group has merged with Sam’s to do some graphing work on the data that the 5th and 6th graders have been collecting about their monarchs. We worked in groups to accurately graph the growth rates and pupation point of several of our caterpillars, then began discussing how we can draw conclusions from those graphs when viewing them.