Scenes from the final week of 2014

Now that the energy and excitement of the play has crested, we have a week left before a well-earned break. The final week in December can often be a tricky one, as people are starting to burst at the seams, but we're still getting a lot done! 

On Monday, the first of our book groups presented to the class, telling us a bit about the characters and themes of Mockingbird, the book they had read. 

Later in the day, Gabe and David gave a presentation teaching us about tiling and tessellation, which included a group activity designed to illustrate what shapes are able to tessellate. (It's difficult to photograph a slideshow in low light, so please know that David is actually pointing out a detail of a tiling, as opposed to just a blob of white light.) 

In Math today, what was meant as a warm-up exercise wound up taking over much of the morning, as kids worked together (using manipulatives, drawings, paper, and white boards) to solve a logic puzzle involving checkers on a board. 

Today was also one of our days for PE, so after working through the morning, they were ready to run off some energy in the afternoon. 

Writing prompts: Taking the ridiculous seriously

We generally have one writing prompt a week. They cover a range of different types of writing, but occasionally I'll give kids something patently absurd to see what they come up with. For example:

I'm always surprised (and delighted) when a writing prompt resonates with a student and they run with it. For example, though this is a particularly silly one, it clearly inspired Eleanor, who crafted a tale of medical mishap, pre-teen angst, and heroic deeds.

Warm-Up activities

We opened and closed our day with a math problem involving triangles. First, kids worked on it this morning on their own or in small groups. In time, everyone got to the correct answer. The really interesting part was later in the afternoon, when a sampling of kids took turns explaining how they had solved it. Of the kids who shared their processes, we saw at least three different methods (and a few variations) on how to approach the problem.

Warm-ups and work spaces

We often begin our school day with a Warm-Up exercise. Today, this problem was part of it: 

"Divide up the grid into four equally sized, equally shaped parts, each containing numbers that add up to 36." 

This task requires an understanding of addition, subtraction, and rotational symmetry, none of which are particularly complicated concepts for a fifth or sixth grader, but applying them to this puzzle becomes quite a challenge! The kids took to the task this morning, each in their own way. 


One of my favorite things about our classroom set up is the number of options that students have when tackling a task like this. Our home base consists of three large work spaces: "Jason's Room," "Sam's Room," and "The Middle School Commons." In general, we're able to allow kids to move to the space in which they feel the most productive. For some kids, that might mean sitting in a silent room at a desk. For others, the ability to collaborate, talk things through, and move around is vital. Having those options available to a student is wonderful. 

A large focus of the fifth and sixth grade years is encouraging increased autonomy and self-discipline. Having a silent room available to a student is great, but the really gratifying part is when a kid starts to take ownership of their own productivity by opting into the space that works best for them. At the beginning of the year, kids will generally sit with their friends when given the choice, regardless of how much they actually get accomplished. Over time (and with occasional guidance), kids start to figure out what environment works best for them, and under what circumstances. 

Some examples from this morning:

Sydney and Kaeli opted to work together on the whiteboard in the middle school commons. They eventually drew a version of the problem on the board with wet erase markers, allowing them to try several different possible solutions  

Chris and David paired up and began working through possibilities on paper. 

Lee opted into the silent room for part of the assignment, venturing out to collaborate with others when he felt it was useful. Eventually, several kids opted into this room. 

This group was particularly social, though not necessarily as immediately productive as they might have liked. After some nudging, they all made choices to move to areas that were a little more in line with their individual working style. 

Morning warm-up: set a fairy tale in the modern day

Today's warm-up is a writing prompt: "Pick a classic fairy tale, and set it in your modern-day hometown."

Lee shared a portion of his, in which one of the Three Little Pigs opts to live in a motel, rather than renting an apartment or buying a condo or a house. This led to an impromptu math exercise, during which we calculated how much he was spending at the motel, versus renting (or buying) a place. We decided that the pig was basically throwing his money away. Economics!

Warm-Up: 10/24/13

We generally start our days with a warm-up assignment of some kind. Today's was a sheet of three logic puzzles. Most of the class worked through the first two quickly, but the third problem ballooned into a class-wide collaboration. The task was to decode a message written in Morse Code. Unfortunately, there were no spaces between the letters, making it a challenge to decipher.

The kids quickly started teaming up, then grouping, and eventually working together as an entire class to tackle the task. I periodically provided small hints, and played them the audio of actual Morse Code messages being transmitted so they could hear how the code has been used over the years.

What was originally intended as a brief get-your-brain-thinking exercise evolved into a 45 minute team-building activity. It was fascinating to watch how each individual worked to contribute to the group in their own way. Some had trouble with deciphering the code themselves, so they began working to help sort and organize the findings of the decoders. They eventually got it, just in time for our Math/Music/Latin rotations to begin.

Warm-Up: 10/23/13

Our warm-up exercise from this morning. After working on it individually, we modeled it together as a class using props; the eraser was our swan, the brown marker was the mouse, the green marker was the rabbit, and the red marker was the deadly, deadly snake. (Click for a closer view)