Jason's Class S-K Archive : games

Showing posts with label games. Show all posts

Friday, April 14, 2017

Week 28 -- Place Out of Time banquet 2017

Monday was the much anticipated Place Out of Time banquet, which finds the entire Summers-Knoll middle school traveling to the University of Michigan to meet face to face with many of the other students who have been participating in the POOT simulation. It’s always a fun trip, and we prepped for it by traveling into the S-K attic to find accents and costumes for the event. Once there, the students discussed and debated different aspects of the case with their peers in break-out groups, as well as in large, whole-group conversations. Afterward, our class was able to stay a little longer, allowing us to have an impromptu reflection conversation with the professors and college student mentors who orchestrate the whole experience. It was a highlight of an already exciting day.

Our journal prompt was student-submitted this week: What is your favorite board game and why? As always, it was interesting to read the range of responses. Some people preferred cooperative games, while others preferred competitive. Some preferred games with large groups of people, others preferred the opposite. One person noted that they liked games that required thought and set up before the game even began. This exercise led nicely into Thursday afternoon, which featured a class boardgame session. Our other writing prompt was a story starter involving a mysterious cloud island. These stories are still in the process of being developed, but the glimpses I’ve seen are promising!

In Math group, we read the first two chapters of The Number Devil, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It’s a fun and strange book in which a young student’s dreams are plagued by an odd creature who shows him some interesting curiosities in mathematics. Take, for example, the pattern formed when you multiply 11x11, and compare it to 111x111, and 1111x1111, and so on. (Try it yourself.) We also dipped into the Roman numeral system, which we will be continuing with next week.

Friday, March 24, 2017

Week 26 -- Tom Joad and dying houseplants

Place Out of Time remains in full swing. On Monday, we went over the transcript of court testimony of Mr. Tom Joad (the fictional character from The Grapes of Wrath) who spoke on the topic of human dignity. Meanwhile, the justices for the trial have been chosen, and they are all now vying for “votes of confidence.” It’s a concept too involved to explain here, but ask your child about it. On a less intense level, one of our warm-ups this week was to draw (or write about) our POOT characters doing something typical. For example, what was something that Stephen Hawking might be doing regularly?

Hedy Lamarr acting

A fun writing prompt this week was “a houseplant is dying. Tell it why it needs to live.” Kids write letters, short scenes, and impassioned speeches, some of which were then delivered to an actual dying houseplant that I borrowed from the science room. The prognosis for the plant is, I believe, quite positive.

Working on luminaries in Art

We also made progress in our current read aloud, which is Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac. It tells a fictionalized account of the true story of the Navajo code talkers of WWII. It’s a remarkable story that’s worth learning a little more about.

We also took an all-middle school field trip to Hill Auditorium to see the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra perform a number of pieces, including a portion of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. It’s a piece that is familiar to our class because we watched an animated interpretation of it from Fantasia 2000 earlier this year.

In math group, we’ve been doubling down on making progress in our Singapore work, focusing on making individual progress in our books, while occasionally taking breaks to play math games like Farkle and Uno.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Week Two -- Monarchs and the adventure park

This week, we continued a project set in motion by last year’s class. Last spring, we began construction of a milkweed garden, hoping to attract the increasingly endangered monarch butterfly to our school. Our work is is paying off, and we have found several monarch caterpillars among the milkweed. With Lisa’s guidance, we have taken them indoors, where we’ve been taking measurements, making observations, tending to their needs, and doing all that we can to increase their likelihood of survival.

We also began using our writing journals (first prompt: “Why do people write?”), learned more about the Yanomami, played some board games, and spent all of Thursday climbing, balancing, and zip lining through the Adventure Park at West Bloomfield.

(Click through for photos)

Tagging and releasing a monarch!

Tracking the monarch through the sky

Mark puts a lot of faith in the harness.

In math group, we spent some time discussing what we liked and disliked about math, establishing that there’s more to mathematics than just arithmetic. We also began individual work in our Singapore books.

Friday, January 8, 2016

Math: assorted recent topics

As discussed in a previous post, the Singapore Math books serve as a backbone of our math curriculum. It is largely an individually-paced program (though small cohorts often form and work together), allowing students to progress at a rate that makes sense for each topic. We have Math class four times a week, and we generally devote one or two sessions to Singapore work, which allows for questions, small group break-out sessions, and targeted group lessons.

With the rest of our class time, we do a variety of activities that benefit the entire group, regardless of where they happen to be in their particular math books. In this post, I wanted to share a few of the things we've done in recent weeks apart from Singapore work.

We regularly work on problem solving as a class. First we'll go through a problem together, and then we'll break off to solve similar problems in small groups or individually. The problems themselves are sometimes slightly ridiculous ones pulled from various places (you may recall this blog post from October), including some of my own design. For example:

For this one, kids worked in groups of two to three, picked a spot and attempted to calculate the volume of the space. After some measurements and calculations, the kids had an approximate volume of the space. They then turned to the internet to try and find inexpensive sources of plastic balls. It turns out there are a lot of options:

You can get anything on the internet.

One enterprising young student even found an online ball pit calculator, complete with tips on how to construct your pit.

Taking measurements to convert the middle school airlock into a ball pit (which is almost certainly a fire code violation).

Now I just need to organize a fundraiser to raise capital for the venture...

Sometimes, someone will ask a question that lends itself to an impromptu mini-lesson.

For example, someone had a question about how to break down a problem from their Singapore book. As a class, we spent a period really breaking down a word problem.

First, I wrote it up on the board as written in the book.

Then, we talked through it. Determining what the question is asking can sometimes be deceptively complicated, so parsing out what is being asked is crucial. Also, there are some vocabulary words that are used infrequently in everyday life, but are important to basic math. Here's what the board looked like after we finished:

It looks particularly complicated because we explored a few of different ways to approach the problem.

We often devote a day to playing math-related games. Sometimes they're classic games like Uno, Blokus, or Othello, and other times, they're Summers-Knoll classics, such as Factor Tag.

A new favorite that we've played is "The Card-Forehead Game." We obviously need to work on a flashier title, but the game itself is really fun.

You play in groups of three. Two players face each other, then each take a playing card and hold it up to their own forehead (so they can't see it, but their opponent can). The third person then generates a simple math problem on the spot based on the cards that each player holds up.

For example, if Nick holds up a 10, and Ella holds up a 7, the third person could say, "Nick minus Ella equals 3."

Both players have to quickly think about what their card must be if that is true. The third player also gets practice by generating the problem in the first place, and making sure they know the correct answer.

Here's a quick video of the game in action:

It's a fun, easy way to get practice in the four operations, firming up math facts along the way.

This post has grown beyond my expectations, so I'll cap this entry here. Look for a follow-up installment in upcoming weeks!

Friday, December 4, 2015

Weeks 9 - 13: Miscellany

I take a lot of photos over the course of a week. Here's a smattering of odds and ends from recent weeks.

Juna is camera shy.

Her classmates are not.

Henry!

Guest artist Leslie Sobel came to share her work with us several weeks ago. The middle school recently visited an exhibition of her work at the Village Theater in Canton. Monica has an entry up on her Middle School Art Blog as well.

Touring the theater

Nick!

We've been studying body systems in Science. Here are some photos of our class constructing a device to simulate the lung.

And here we see kids puzzling through the muscular-skeletal system. They are attempting to construct a "muscle" that mimics the hinge joint of the human elbow.

Silent reading time:

Each Monday morning, the whole school gathers for an assembly. Here, the student government representatives articulate and demonstrate the rights and responsibilities that they have come up with.

Using the windows as a giant light box for tracing.

Bora!

As part of our exploration of the various body systems, we've been constructing paper models of ourselves with each system taped inside. It's yielded some odd photo opportunities.