The Rookery

Today, the Herons were asked to brainstorm how we might teach our families and the rest of the school about our theme.  In the picture above, you can see what the conversation grew in to.  In about an hour, every single student added to the plans (a partial speaker's list…

Close Reading This week we read the last newspaper in our Pre-Revolutionary America theme.  The Battle of Lexington and Concord shifted the debate in the colonies and the rag-tag underground Sons of Liberty made way for Washington's Continental army and open rebellion.  Together, we read the first part of the…

The Herons' newest PE unit is cross country running.  We have a set course that we return to every day and each day we share techniques that help us be stronger runners.  Students have suggested such things as "when you feel like stopping, pick a nearby goal and run to…

In March of 1770, five colonists were killed by a group of nine British soldiers outside the custom house.  Some of the papers at the time reported it as the "Boston Massacre"…others called it the "Incident on King Street."  About six months after it happened, the soldiers were put on…

The Herons have settled into our Forest School routine.  Two weeks ago, we graphed a data set from the first junco sighting of the fall from 1952 to 1990 as recorded by Orwin Rustad, a naturalist in Rice County.  We found the latest, earliest and mode of our the set…

Looking back over this year's communication, I realized that I've written often about math and theme but haven't yet shared much about our work in reading.  Reading is woven into our daily routine in a way that is not as flashy as some of the other work in the Herons…

Making (and tasting) shrubs with Margit. Fourth and fifth graders are able to be two places at one time.  Developmentally, they are just now able to pretend…and know they are pretending.  They haven't lost the skills of creative play but they have gained the skills of analysis.  Because of this, role…

Our day took an unexpected turn today when I heard a murmur about teasing on the bus.  It seemed that there was a fair amount of drama about who had a crush on whom.  I brought it up to the Herons in our class meeting and yes, it was going…

We are in the midst of a geometry rotation right now and I am teaching about angles and triangles.  Geometry is a branch of mathematics that has a lot of vocabulary in it — and it can be tempting to start there: acute, obtuse, perpendicular.  But students need understanding on…

Counting our line plot data to determine mode. Working with real data and analyzing what it's telling us is an on-going project in fourth and fifth grade.  I have come to believe that it's one of the most important skills citizens in a democracy need.  We are bombarded with studies…