Week 30 -- Choose your own adventure

This week has been a whirlwind of collaboration. On Monday, we began working on an all-class choose-your-own-adventure story. We began by composing the first portion together as a whole-group activity, projecting the story on the big class TV. We took turns offering ideas for plot points and dialogue, finding our way to the first big branching point. We continued on and wrote the first parts of each branch as a group. At that point, we had four stories to continue, so we broke into smaller groups. Those groups continued autonomously, each coming up with their own subsequent branching points and splitting into smaller and smaller groups as the stories progressed. Eventually, everyone will be writing endings individually (and contributing to other storylines as they develop). It’s all being recorded in a crazy shared Google document. It's been a delight to see how the kids have taken the stories in radically different directions. You can sneak a peek of it here, with the caveat that it has not been completed or edited yet.

Thursday was a day that was particularly full of excitement, as we had two dramatic arrivals in our classroom. First of all, sturdy new tables arrived to replace the rickety ones that we had been working with. The class reacted passionately against them. (They sometimes fear change.) Eventually, an elite tiger team of go-getters took it upon themselves to start cleaning the tables off and getting them integrated into our space. Then, at the very end of the day, the very first sets of professionally printed cards from our Into the Biome game project arrived. They look great, which was a powerful motivator for the other three groups to get theirs completed and ordered as well. (Everyone is getting very close!)

Rachel works with the combined 5/6 grades every Thursday for library and technology. Here, they are discussing an article on the appropriation and alteration of Michelle Obama's image for a mural. 

An assortment of other things filled in the rest of the week, including a visit from Violet and Abe (complete with age appropriate read alouds), some background on how caves form, and a decidedly odd writing prompt about a unicorn head mask. Responses varied, as you would imagine.

A pick-up game of soccer with the 1/2s. 

In Math group, we spent Monday and part of Tuesday going through A Parable of Polygons, which is a fascinating interactive blog post written by Vi Hart and Nicky Case that creates a model society that values diversity, yet harbors a small bit of inherent bias (sound familiar?). By reading through and interacting with it, you start to see some interesting patterns emerging. It’s a thought-provoking post for young and old, and I heartily recommend exploring it on your own. We also read another chapter of The Number Devil, and devoted a couple of days to Singapore work time.

Week 29 -- Reflections, presentation, and 20 words

This was quite a varied week. As Place Out of Time draws to a close, we are taking time to look back on the experience with a reflection assignment. Our first Into the Biome project group placed the order for their game cards, which we are all eager to see in person. Sana shared a presentation on her recent trip to India, complete with an assortment of snacks brought back from the other side of the globe. One writing prompt asked students what items they would save if their house burned down (assuming all family and pets were already safe), and another asked them to imagine a world in which they could only use 20 words for the rest of their lives. (Making a list of 20 essential words is challenging, to say the least.) Perhaps the most animated discussions this week surrounded the first hints of our annual Spring trip, the details of which are currently being nailed down. (Families, expect an email about this soon.)

In Math group, we continued learning some of the rules of the Roman numeral system, while also devoting a fair amount of time to our Singapore books.

Week 28 -- Place Out of Time banquet 2017

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.