STATE OF THE BLOG

Cleaning the bus after the 2015-2016 Spring Trip

Greetings friends, families, and well-wishers! This is a quick post to let you know how I plan to use the blog this year. It's a little different than in previous years. 

If you are a current Summers-Knoll family, you are hopefully receiving a weekly email from the school with a letter from the Head of School, important dates and information, and brief curriculum updates from each of the faculty. Our hope is that the updates in that weekly email will give you a glimpse into our classroom, as well as a peek into your child's previous and future classrooms. (Also, a lot of cool things happen here, so we're hoping you'll take a look and spread the word.) 

Those updates, however, don't include the many photos and videos that are taken all week. So I plan to use the blog to repost those weekly updates, accompanied by photos (and occasionally videos, relevant links, etc). 

In addition to that, I plan on posting a more in-depth entry about what we're up to about once a month. My hope is to give you some insight into not only what we do, but why. 

Please feel free to comment or email whenever the mood strikes you. Thanks for reading about our class! 

(NOTE: If you subscribe to this blog by email, you've likely noticed that this is the fifth post I've made today. Sorry about that! In the future, they'll be paced in a much more reasonable manner.) 

A panorama of our classroom on the first day of school 

Jason's Class: The Trailer

It is astonishingly difficult to get ten different kids to 1.) smile, 2.) keep their eyes open, and 3.) look at a camera at the same time.  

In this blog post, enjoy the many attempts that I made, along with a smattering of various happenings from the last few weeks. 

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Here's a video that you may have seen over email. Ella has called it "the trailer for our class." 

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We've had a few birthdays lately. It's a class tradition to allow the birthday person to choose a class activity in celebration. On Ella's birthday, she opted for "class karaoke." Watch the video below at your peril. 

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There has been a lot of wetland exploration at recess.

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Shan was unexpectedly out sick for PE one day, so we picked a park, got on a bus, and headed over to check it out. 

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In Math, kids are doubling down on their book work, setting personal goals for the end of the year. Some classes are spent working toward those goals, others are spent playing math games. Here are a couple of moments from a class game of Farkle, which is a favorite. 

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There have been a number of presentations lately. We've been learning about the American Revolution, and Nick prepared a lecture on the military tactics of that time. 

Later, Miel and Bora presented on guinea pigs, complete with a guest appearance by Miel's pets. 

Oliver the human meets Oliver the guinea pig. 

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Our milkweed & monarch project continues to require a significant amount of work. The good news is that our beds are almost prepared. 

This was on Juna's birthday. This probably wasn't how she planned on spending it. 

Rest for the weary. 

Our impact study. We delicately examine logs, looking to see what might be living in the area where we were digging. 

Here's what we found! These are the mystery eggs discovered beneath a log (pillbug provided for scale). Any ideas on what they are? 

This is the site where we harvested soil for our beds. What is the impact of our actions? What did this site look like before, and what will it look like after we've gone? Now that we've seen the small impact that we made, we were led to wonder where soil purchased from stores comes from? 

When we return from our spring trip, we'll be forging ahead to get things planted and established before the end of school. 

(Don't call it) Spirit Week

The week before Spring Break was positively packed with activity, even though there were only four days of school. Here's a quick recap. 

The Summers-Knoll student government organized the second annual Super Happy Fun Week. The schedule was as follows: 

Monday: Character Day Dress as a favorite character (from a book, from a movie etc).Tuesday: Pajama Day Wear your PJs.Wednesday: Fun RunThursday: Culture Day. The 7-8s will prepare lunchtime snacks from Sweden, Uganda, Argentina, and Japan (same menu as last year). The Choir will serenade us with songs from Kenya, Australia, and Texas

This photo is from character day, which might not be immediately obvious, given that many students were clearly determined to hide from the camera. 

Wednesday ended with an all-school Fun Run. It was particularly fun to see so many members of our community participating beyond just the students. Look carefully, and you'll spot teachers, staff, and parents also taking part. 

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The kids in Jason's math group have learned a lot about 'Flatland' this year. Originally published in 1884, there have been several adaptations of it over the years, and we've explored a few of them. It's a topic that we revisit from time to time, most recently as a project: Kids are creating their own games based on aspects of Flatland. 

We've brainstormed a number of different possibilities in terms of game mechanics and objectives, and lately kids have been constructing game materials, writing instructions, and play-testing prototypes with their classmates. 

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One of the lovely things about our school is that students have the opportunity to take time from our regularly scheduled curriculum and activities to pursue individual projects. Bora and Eva have used this opportunity to develop clay-based projects, guided by Monica, our middle school art teacher. Check out their progress!

Bora and his cat

Eva and her dragon

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We also recently hosted another Middle School Game Night. These are quickly becoming a tradition at Summers-Knoll, and they're a fun, low-stakes way to socialize and have fun. 

Upon reflection, I'm realizing that "low stakes" was the incorrect term to use, as I have rarely seen a group of people so invested in a game of Jenga. 

Equality, Justice, Harrison Bergeron, and the Global Village

Nick and Eva spy a visitor to the Howell Nature Center Global Village.

We began our week in the spotlight, as it was the job of the 5/6s to lead our Monday morning assembly. Each Monday morning, all of the students, staff, and faculty (and occasional parents, grandparents, and other family members!) gather in the atrium for a community gathering. A different homeroom leads the meeting each week, often taking the opportunity to share something that's been going on in our classes. 

We chose to spotlight our trip to the Howell Nature Center Global Village, and we adapted the skits that they wrote and performed there for the Summers-Knoll community. While writing them, the kids were very thoughtful about how to best convey what we had learned to the wide age range of our audience. The Global Village trip is a fun and exciting experience, but the underlying message is quite serious. The fifth and sixth graders felt enlightened about the severity of inequity in the world, but they didn't want to disturb, for example, their Kindergarten compatriots while sharing what they had learned. We opted to share our direct experiences, and only briefly touch on the larger issues. It allowed us to introduce some ideas, and hopefully generate some conversation and thought. 

As I narrated, the entire group of fifth and sixth graders acted out brief skits about the challenges and triumphs of the trip: Learning to communicate with each other, bartering for resources, starting a cooking fire, trying to cook with limited ingredients, and eventually trying to fall asleep in cramped and primitive quarters. It was a fun and breezy presentation, that will hopefully generate further conversations.

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And since we're talking about equality... 

This image always gets people talking. I'll come back to it in a moment. 

As part of a beginning-of-the-year writing exercise, I was asking the kids about the basic elements of a story. They quickly rattled off "characters, plot, and setting," but when someone said "theme," many had a hard time explaining what it meant. As a result, I did a read aloud of a Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Have you read it? If not, you can do so here. Go on! It's a very quick read. I'll wait....

While you do that, here's a photo of Henry, Niko, Kaz, and Eva celebrating their success at keeping their Global Village balloon baby alive through the night. 

Well, what did you think? Vonnegut really yanks the rug out from under you at the end there, doesn't he? 

Harrison Bergeron is a great story to read with 5th and 6th graders. It's funny, brief, and features a big idea that's played out to an almost cartoonish degree. The idea of mandatory equality appeals to them, just as much as the implementation of concept in the story appalls them. (And I've found that the concept of the ear piece broadcasting thought-scattering noises every twenty seconds is a great thing to reference during the times in the year when interrupting each other becomes an issue. Blurting things out when we're having a group conversation causes everyone to have to mentally reset over and over.) (If you haven't read Harrison Bergeron, and you just skimmed past that link earlier, this sentence made no sense to you. For shame.) 

Kids like to talk about the different handicaps mentioned in the story, which gets us into talk about why the characters in the story would willfully submit to them (and why other characters would attempt to subvert them). The discussion eventually turns to the idea of equality not necessarily being an inherently good thing, as exemplified by the Equality Versus Justice cartoon above. 

Of course, Vonnegut's story is satirical, and being very bright kids, they realized that the society represented in the story didn't match either side of the Equality Versus Justice image. In fact, the equality in Harrison Bergeron was best represented by this image:  

Equal!

One can interpret Vonnegut's story a number of ways (and people have! Not always to Vonnegut's satisfaction...), which is another great reason to read it with kids who are expanding their understanding of social justice, while also developing a sense of the power of writing.