A quick reminder about other S-K blogs

The specialist teachers have blogs as well, be sure to check them out! Here are a few links: 

Monica maintains a Middle School Art blog. Check it out! 

Imogen has a blog for her classes. It can be found here. Here are some recent entries that are particularly relevant to the 5/6s: 
- les vrais?

- toi et moi

In addition to those, it can be really useful and interesting to check out the other classroom blogs. Find a list of links to those here. 


Finally, just to add some visual interest to this post, here are some maps made of my room and the middle school commons from a recent activity: 

Catching up on Feburary - Hodge Podge #1

February has been a bit of a whirlwind, what with a flurry of field trips and new projects and activities. The blog has been fallow for the last few weeks, so we're going to play catch-up with new posts over the next couple of days. 

First up, a few scenes from school from this week: 

Nick and Imogen preparing for a French presentation. 

Keira and Sam discussing the properties of angles. 

Frigid temperatures kept us indoors for PE, but everyone had a good time doing cup stacking. Did you know that "sport stacking" is a thing? It's good for hand-eye coordination, cooperation, and ambidexterity. Read more here. 

Speaking of cooperation, they were pretty pleased with themselves after building this creation. (They were equally delighted when they knocked it down.) 

There was some cooking in Mandarin today. 

I (Jason) run an after-school comics and cartooning club once a week. A couple of months ago, Oliver started creating a stick figure comic book each week, often featuring the exploits of Guy Wiz.

Guy Wiz is a simple idea: A wizard-type fellow battles his enemies by casting spells that are increasingly ridiculous. For example, Guy Wiz might shout "Pig Spell!" during a brawl, which then causes a pig to inexplicably fall from the sky to vanquish his opponent (and they get much weirder than that). It's a fun little comic.

I mention it because Oliver has been cranking out issues of Guy Wiz. He showed up the other day with twenty issues, each more ridiculous than the last. It's fun to see him taking a simple, silly idea and really running with it, and you can really see his creativity exploding. He's also pretty pleased to have such a body of work, and his classmates (and teacher!) were delighted and impressed.

Visitors

We had a couple of special guests today: 

Kermit the Frog (and nephew Robin) visit French class. 

This isn't a photo from last year. Summers-Knoll alum Adi's school is off today, so she elected to come visit for the day! 

Spring Trip 2014: Karenna writes about Old Fort Niagara

Our first stop on Jason and Sam’s ⅚ class Spring trip was Old Fort Niagara, in the state of New York. On the outside you couldn’t tell how many traps were lying in wait for the British, there were deep ditches, stake walls, and cannons hiding behind the small round hills. At first glance, it looks like some kind of moat, but if you take a closer look, steep ditches create numerous hills, high walls, and the tight fences prevent people who don’t know where the entrance, is from coming in.

After we walked around to the side of the fort, a bridge stood there, leading to the entrance. The tour guide asked us to find ways the French could have prevented the British from entering, and after a bit, he told us. There were small hills on the side near the entrance, and behind them were cannons loaded with grapeshot (bullets that were shot out of cannons). There was also a drawbridge, but no one knew why the half of the bridge closest to the fort was wooden. According to the tour guide, it was so the French could burn it down if the British were attacking. To us, it didn’t make much sense, but to the French, keeping their fort was much more important that keeping a bridge.

After we entered, we toured the building where the resources were kept, and the building where the gun powder was kept, before our tour guide handed us over to some French military, so we could learn how to be a soldier. One of the soldiers (his name was Lee) demonstrated shooting his gun, before handing us our own muskets to practice firing. (Ours were wooden, don’t worry) we learned how to hold them, load them and fire them, with specific steps that were very terrifying. SPRINKLE SPRINKLE SPRINKLE!!! See how intimidating I am?

Next came my favorite part. I have just one sentence to describe it. Are you ready? La Bayonet! La Bayonet! La Bayonet!! Thats right folks, we used the famous invisible bayonets to storm an American soldier and a British musician! After we won our battle, and completed our training, we were left to explore the fort as we liked. So I went and spent my time looking inside the buildings, and enjoying the scenic hills. Overall, I think Old Fort Niagara was one of my favorite sites that we visited! You should definitely try out the soldier thing. La Bayonet! La Bayonet! La Bayonet!!

In one of the supply buildings, we experimented with different pulley systems to see how simple machines can make moving heavy items much, much easier. 

We also learned a lot about barrels, which amused Lee for some reason. 

Check out Imogen's blog!

Be sure to check out Imogen's blog for an entry about Sydney's ballet demonstration!

http://imogen-sk.blogspot.com/2013/10/langue-et-danse.html