The Rookery

I don't know if I'll ever feel calm the night (or weeks) before school starts — but there is no better feeling than taking off on the first day of school.  The questions, the excitement, the jokes, the ideas…everything falls into place and the cogs of the classroom machine start to turn and chug.  And just like that, we're off — busy learning, laughing, trying and becoming a class.

The Herons were very busy today.  We settled into our independent reading routine, learned how to sharpen pencils with "Carl," our new Japanese pencil sharpener (the students dubbed him Carl…), shared some of our favorite books, went outside in a pouring rain storm, began to add to our natural history collection, learned a ridiculous song about llamas, celebrated a birthday, and began to define what we believed was important about our class of Herons.

We also began collecting data about our classmates which we'll be presenting in a variety of ways.  Today students concentrated on finding a good question to ask the other Herons that wasn't binary (yes/no) and had a limited number of answers.  We'll soon know everything from the Herons' favorite pizzas to which planet they would most like to travel to.  We systematically collected answers to our questions using a class attendance sheet and, in the next few days, we'll graph our data.  Many fifth graders, who surveyed their classmates at the beginning of last year, will be ready to construct circle graphs using percentages that they figure out.  Many fourth graders will create circle graphs using fractions.  This kind of project enables each child to learn new math within a meaningful context.

One of the fifth graders asked for the opportunity to share some of his favorite things about the classroom with the fourth graders so we split up and gave tours of the more unusual features of the Herons — many of the highlights will be a part of the scavenger hunt your child will create for you for next Tuesday's curriculum night so I don't want to give anything away here.

We also went out at recess in the rain.  We played "knee coup" a game in which you have to tap other people's knees.  The key to the game is "honorable" play in which you call yourself out rather than having someone else have to say "I tagged you!"  "Trust the truthful tagger" has long been a mainstay of Prairie Creek play but this year I'm experimenting with the wording used by Adventures in Cardboard (a Twin Cities based daycamp).  They say "Call yourself out."  I love the pro-active, personal responsibility created by shifting the focus from the tagger to the tagged.  As the Herons and I discussed — if the tagger has to tell you you've been tagged, something has already gone wrong in the game.

Using rain soaked hair to write on our Buddah Boards

Going out in the rain was also great practice for Forest School which begins tomorrow.  Forest School is a new adventure for me…the Herons and I talked about how we were probably going to have to adjust things as we went along.  There are a lot of pieces I feel sure of and some challenges (such as the mosquito swarms) that I'm not sure how we'll tackle.  The good news is that the Herons definitely seem up for it.  One child even took off his rain coat in the middle of the down pour because he wanted to get more wet.  Gotta love it.

Here are some shots from our math data collection – I didn't have the settings right on my camera so some are blurry, my apologies!  Kids move fast.