The Rookery

There can be a lot of pressure for a school to adopt the latest technology.  iPads for every kid, Smartboards in every room – once one district does it, it can seem like your kids are at a disadvantage if they don't have the same stuff.  I am not a…

Math (making sense out of the world using numbers) is truly everywhere.  But it can take some practice to start to see it. Today the Herons read an article about the Buffalo snow storm and then I asked them to work with a partner to write two questions about the…

We hear so much about literacy in the home – reading to your child, having periodicals in the house, having family reading time.  But we rarely talk about numeracy in the home, especially after the basics of having your child count things.  That's a shame because as students become more…

"Use what you know to figure out what you don't know."  That phrase lies at the heart of our current math focus:  algebra.  Mathematicians are puzzlers – they try to put pieces together to figure things out.  They use numbers to make sense of the world.  The fourth and fifth…

Last Tuesday, I was asked to speak to a Carleton educational psychology class about constructivist learning. (Lest my head get too big, the guest speaker before me who was the professor's dog who demonstrated behavioralism.)   Constructivist learning is at the heart of the progressive classroom.  Essentially, it posits that…

"Swink" is a word for work that was used in the 1700s and we've been doing a lot of it lately.  In the early colonial period, much of the work was shared among all of the people in a village – bread baking, lumber cutting, plowing – all were shared…

Several days last week, I loaded children onto the bus while they were still chanting "Join the Sons of Liberty" or "Long live the King" at each other.  I overheard students talking at lunch about the "blockish King" and before school times have been a frenzy of flag making.  This…

We began our exploration math by, well, exploring pentominoes.  In this blog entry I want to share what the class did and then show, in bold, the math habit that we (teachers) were working to develop.   First, we began by establishing a definition of an "-omino."  An -omino was a…

This past week we wrapped up our first Writing Circle cycle.  Writing Circle is a workshop format that accelerates a student's understanding of writing for an audience.  In a traditional writing workshop, students conference individually with peers but especially teachers.  Sharing one's work is important but, because of the constraints of…

We had a near perfect day at Caron Park.  It was wonderful to have so much time together – and the warm weather kept everyone cheerful. We began at the Motherland – a waterfall where three creeks come together in the center of the park.  Exploration teams headed in three…