Week 7 - Where we've been, where we're going

We go outside unless the weather is truly dangerous, which means we endure the occasional rain shower. This inspired some kids to come up with a hands-free way to hold umbrellas. 

Much of this week was spent reflecting on what we’ve done this year to inform what will come next. The monarchs have flown, and planting season is far away, so our milkweed and monarch thoughts have turned toward what next steps we’d like to take in this developing program. On Monday, we shared our brainstorming for what we’d like to do during this year (make videos, write guides, author books), and what we’d like to see happening with the project five years from now (S-K families making gardens at their homes, collecting scientifically useful data, partnering with other schools and organizations). Some of these projects will be completed this year, others will be things that we build toward over time.

We’ve also shifted the focus of our study of the Yanomami, turning toward the myths and legends of their culture. This year’s school play will have a mythology theme, and our class will be adapting one of their myths for our portion of the script . To that end, we’re also learning about what myths are, especially in terms of how they are passed down to teach the values of a culture. Studying the stories that a culture shares can give insight to what that culture values. (If you dare, ask one of the students about the story of how humans first obtained fire.)

As always, we’ve also had a couple of writing prompts. In our journals, we responded to the Theodore Roosevelt quote, “Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right,” while our creative writing prompt was, “You are a dragon raised by a family of turkeys. Describe the moment that you discovered your true identity.” Responses varied.

In math, we continued to work with Sam’s math group on learning the various ways to plot data about monarch development, while also devoting two days to work on our individual Singapore progress.

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.

Week One -- Yanomami, magic, milkweed, and monarchs

We began our year by exploring the difficulty in remaining objective when learning about something new. To illustrate this, we delved into Napoleon Chagnon’s infamous field work with the Yanomami tribes of the Amazon rainforest. How can one accurately study a culture that is entirely different than the one that they were raised in? Was his study ethical? Are his findings biased? Closer to home, what biases do we bring to our current political debate?

We also began writing stories based on the Arthur C. Clark assertion that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (What would your great-great-great grandparent think of an iPad? What would someone from the stone age think of a flamethrower?)

We’re also writing and performing short skits for each other illustrating our three classroom guidelines: Awareness, Communication, and Everything Gets Respect.

Playing Factor Tag in Math class. 

Playing Factor Tag in Math class. 

Meanwhile, in our math group, we began talking about polling, and exploring how a sample of a population doesn’t necessarily provide an accurate picture of the whole group.

Our week concluded with an exciting find in the milkweed garden created by our class last year: A monarch caterpillar in "hanging j" position, which we watched transition into a chrysalis: 

We also found other caterpillars, which we took collected to raise in the protective environment of our classroom.