Week 30 -- Choose your own adventure

This week has been a whirlwind of collaboration. On Monday, we began working on an all-class choose-your-own-adventure story. We began by composing the first portion together as a whole-group activity, projecting the story on the big class TV. We took turns offering ideas for plot points and dialogue, finding our way to the first big branching point. We continued on and wrote the first parts of each branch as a group. At that point, we had four stories to continue, so we broke into smaller groups. Those groups continued autonomously, each coming up with their own subsequent branching points and splitting into smaller and smaller groups as the stories progressed. Eventually, everyone will be writing endings individually (and contributing to other storylines as they develop). It’s all being recorded in a crazy shared Google document. It's been a delight to see how the kids have taken the stories in radically different directions. You can sneak a peek of it here, with the caveat that it has not been completed or edited yet.

Thursday was a day that was particularly full of excitement, as we had two dramatic arrivals in our classroom. First of all, sturdy new tables arrived to replace the rickety ones that we had been working with. The class reacted passionately against them. (They sometimes fear change.) Eventually, an elite tiger team of go-getters took it upon themselves to start cleaning the tables off and getting them integrated into our space. Then, at the very end of the day, the very first sets of professionally printed cards from our Into the Biome game project arrived. They look great, which was a powerful motivator for the other three groups to get theirs completed and ordered as well. (Everyone is getting very close!)

Rachel works with the combined 5/6 grades every Thursday for library and technology. Here, they are discussing an article on the appropriation and alteration of Michelle Obama's image for a mural. 

An assortment of other things filled in the rest of the week, including a visit from Violet and Abe (complete with age appropriate read alouds), some background on how caves form, and a decidedly odd writing prompt about a unicorn head mask. Responses varied, as you would imagine.

A pick-up game of soccer with the 1/2s. 

In Math group, we spent Monday and part of Tuesday going through A Parable of Polygons, which is a fascinating interactive blog post written by Vi Hart and Nicky Case that creates a model society that values diversity, yet harbors a small bit of inherent bias (sound familiar?). By reading through and interacting with it, you start to see some interesting patterns emerging. It’s a thought-provoking post for young and old, and I heartily recommend exploring it on your own. We also read another chapter of The Number Devil, and devoted a couple of days to Singapore work time.

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.

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.

Week 23 -- Filling in the gaps, fear is a LIAR.

In science, we're continuing to work with our gravity-powered cars. 

After a relaxing week off, we got right to work with an extension to our Place Out of Time timelines project. By now, almost everyone has a detailed timeline of the life of their character posted in the appropriate spot on our giant timeline in the middle school commons. However, most of our characters are clustered in the twentieth century. This week, we have spent some time populating the gaps in our huge timeline to provide more context for the scope of human history. For example, before this week, there were no events recorded in the entire 1400s. Now, there are notes about the world-changing voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, and another noting that the game of chess was in its modern form by 1475. Each student has been tasked with putting up at least five cards on the timeline this week, with more to come in the weeks ahead. Also POOT-related, Sam led the entire 5-6 group in a discussion about dignity, which is a concept that is the heart of the issue framing Place Out of Time this year.

Calculating averages for each of our trials

We also concluded our read aloud on Monday afternoon. The climax of When You Reach Me is mind-bending and unexpected, revealing the fact that many tiny details along the way were actually clues, laid out like breadcrumbs for the reader to discover. It’s a lovely book that tightly-plotted and bittersweet. Ask your child about “the Laughing Man” and see what they’ll reveal about the story.

Our journal prompt this week was “fear is a liar.” Kids were asked to respond to the idea, considering what it might mean, evaluating the validity of the statement, and coming up with examples that might argue the point either way. Students wrote about how fear was both useful (it keeps you from harm), but also occasionally counterproductive (roller coasters are fun, planes are useful).

Of course, the impending Music Cafe tends to take over the week, so focus quickly shifted toward that by the end of the week.

In math group, we celebrated a couple of kids completing assessments and moving into new books, worked collaboratively on some problems (ask about Danielle, her pet crocodile, the parrot, and the monkey), and had an always-popular math game day.

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!