Spring Trip -- Day 2 -- photo-rama

Greetings from Kentucky! Here's a trove of photos for you to take a look through. They are barely curated and often blurry, as it is difficult to take photos in caves. Nevertheless, look carefully and you'll see some kids having a blast. 

(For even more photos, visit our Twitter page. You don't need to be a Twitter user to see it. Just click this link: https://twitter.com/JasonsClassTrip )

Starting the day off properly. 

Very sharp, very large thorns.

Spot Joey's illuminated face. 

The caves have a lot of very, very old graffiti. 

"Bottomless Pit." It's deep. 

"Fat Man's Misery." This is a pretty tight squeeze on the tour. 

This is what it looks like as you exit the cave. 

It doesn't look as dramatic in this photo, but this parking lot was CRAZILY slanted. 

There are a lot of bumper boat photos. Sorry. It's photogenic. And fun!

Back at the campsite. There's lots to do here as well! 

Spring Trip -- Day 1 -- photos galore

Our little class is on a big trip! Here's an assortment of photos to give you a sense of what we've been up to. These cover day one, which found us departing from S-K, heading to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, and then finishing up the day in Cave City. 
(For even more photos, visit our Twitter page. You don't need to be a Twitter user to see it. Just click this link: https://twitter.com/JasonsClassTrip )

 

The moment of departure.

Rest stop

The grounds of the Creation Museum. We had our sack lunches next to a tranquil pond. They have quite a lovely garden. As we prepared to go in, we discussed the following (mangled and misattributed, but still useful) quote:

"It is the sign of an educated mind to be able to consider an idea without accepting it."

We parsed the meaning together, essentially coming up with a directive for how to tour the exhibits in the museum: Don't scoff at them and don't dismiss them out of hand. Instead, think about what they are trying to say. Consider what arguments they're trying to use. You don't have to agree with the argument, but you should try to understand the point of view being expressed, and where it comes from.

After that brief, but useful conversation, we went in. It's among the weirdest places I've ever been, and the photos don't really do it justice.  

Henry considers.

The entire museum is a large, elaborate persuasive essay. The thesis is that one can interpret the Christian Bible to be literally true, and that the bulk of scientific understanding can be interpreted to prove this worldview. 

The museum is divided into many rooms with different purposes. One early room has a bunch of displays that compare and contrast "Man's Word" and "God's Word." 

Here, for example, is "Man's Word" on the timeline of the universe. We've been learning about this timeline in school recently. The museum rejects this version of events, and puts forth one that says that the Earth is only about 6000 years old. 

There are a lot of displays with animatronics. Here is a depiction of the Garden of Eden, complete with man, penguins, and (just out of frame) dinosaurs.

There is a big section on the story of Noah's ark. In class, we have discussed the prevalence of flood myths around the world, including the epic of Gilgamesh, which was the subject of a school play a few years back. That flood story also involves a boat created to save living things. 

The dioramas in this section are amazing. 

Life on the ark. 

There are a lot of dinosaurs at the Creation Museum. Fossils, pictures, animatronic, and stuffed ones in the gift shop. Back at school, we've been learning about fossil formation in science with Lisa. 

We've talked a lot about religion and mythology this year, and the roles that they play in cultures. This stop was a fascinating exploration of one example of that. We'll surely be unpacking what we saw next week back in school. 


Back to the bus: 

DInner and dancing in Cave City, Kentucky:

Our home for the next couple nights. 

Week 32 -- Reflections and running

We began the week with a warm-up created by Evie, which tasked kids to design an umbrella, then write about a day in its life. One story has the umbrella married to a broom, who has been put out of work by the fancy new vacuum. A few had the umbrellas lamenting the amount of time they spend whiling away their days unused and hanging on hooks. At least a couple incorporated Seattle. We also spent some time listening to an assortment of each other’s work as I read it aloud from their files. We do a wide variety of writing in our class, and I often collect it and hold onto it for long periods of time. Then, I occasionally read samples of work anonymously. The class generally loves hearing each other’s work, trying to guess who wrote what, and delighting in hearing work with fresh ears. It also gives them a periodic reminder of just how much they’ve produced this year, and how good much of it is.

Some of the cards from Into the Great Barrier Reef

Because we’re so deep into the school year, some aspect of these weekly summaries will frequently be different versions of this: We also continued work on our ongoing projects. This week, we had two more milestones in our biome game groups. One group figured out an efficient and good looking way to correct the mistakes in their game decks, and they’re well on their way to the finish line. We were also very excited to officially place the order for the Into the Siberian Taiga group! We’ll likely receive them in the next week or so.

Two other big events kept everyone occupied this week. Reflections Night preparation always dominates the week of a performance, and everyone seemed to have a great time at the event. We capped the week off with the long-postponed Fun Run around the building, followed by the more intense S-K 5K.

In math group, we’re trying to finish the year with strong showings in our Singapore work, so we’ve been focusing a lot of time in class making progress. We also had one of our beloved game days this week to break up the routine.

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.