Week 16 -- Writing stories, making art, bowling, and sledding

The week before a big break is one that always threatens to descend into chaos. Happily, we have a few projects that have kept us busy and engaged in these last days of 2016.


The artwork for our biome games is coming along marvelously, but it’s a lot of work. Each team needs to make a total of 41 cards, each with unique artwork, and each student has taken responsibility for some portion of that. We’re also in the process of assigning point values to each card, which need to accurately represent the organism’s place in the trophic level of the biome, while also being a functional card in the mechanics of the game.

Artwork for Into the Great Barrier Reef 

Artwork for Into the Great Barrier Reef 

Everyone also started a new story from their choice of one of the following writing prompts; “Write a story in which a young superhero gets a part-time job to support his/her secret identity. Unfortunately, s/he is hired by a super villain.” “Write a story about a magician who has a terrible act… until s/he discovers a mysterious portal to another dimension.” “While digging in the woods, a child stumbles across five ancient dragon eggs…”

The rest of the week was peppered with other activities. We made more progress in When You Reach Me, which is our current read aloud book. The highlights of the week, however, are both the work of PE superstar Shan Cook, who arranged an all-middle school bowling trip on Wednesday morning, and a sledding trip for us on Friday. Here are 45,000 photos for you to peruse (it's difficult to shoot photos in a bowling alley):

Finally, we kept things simple in our math group, devoting one day to Singapore work, and the other to a spirited session of math games. Have a lovely break!

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.