The Rookery

The past few days have been joyful in the Herons.  Students have settled in and found their place and have begun producing some beautiful work.  Our nature journals arrived from the Sketchy Artist on Tuesday and, instead of our planned math review, I decided that the blank pages were just too much of a Siren call.  We chose favorite leaves at the end of our tree work (we had been working to use a dichotomous tree to identify the trees around the school — more on that another time) and then students sat down to sketch…and sketch…and sketch.  Their work showed care, patience and precision.  Many got out hand lenses for a closer look.  They experimented with page lay out.  The results were astonishing and the students took great pride in what they'd done.  I've created a slow pan Flip video of them so you can see their work. (note that the blog continues for a paragraph under the video.

Another beautiful work session occurred at the end of the day today.  This summer, as I looked at our initial theme, "trees," I became interested in mazes and the way that mazes are made.  Mazes are basically decision trees with each intersection a node that can branch in (usually) two directions.  My curriculum research led me to the algorithms (or instruction sets) that are used to create mazes.  They seemed a stretch for 4/5s, especially at the beginning of the year so I put them to the side.  But things have been going so well that I decided to give one a try today.  The students wrote down the "Depth First Algorithm" and watched me apply it to a grid.  Then they gave it a try.

We often celebrate the difficult in the Herons, holding our heads and groaning, "The learning…it hurts!"  I talk about how confusion is a necessary, if painful part of learning and, if your brain doesn't "hurt" with confusion during the day, one isn't doing one's job.  But this algorithm…well, it was so different from anything they had done before, I had my doubts that the confusion would be productive.  We might be beyond what the educational theorist Lev Vygotsky calls the "zone of proximal development."

I shouldn't have worried.  The Herons not only began to grasp the algorithm, they began to make changes to it so that it would create better mazes.  Depth first can create fairly long, boring "corridors" but, as C.H. discovered, "If you add a rule that you can't go the same direction more than twice in a row, you get better mazes."  It was exciting to see students work through a practice maze or two until they got it.  As one said, "Wow, now that I get it, this is really cool!"  Many took graph paper home to continue their maze generation at home this weekend.  Here's a link to see the "Depth First" algorithm at work.