The Rookery

On Thursday before break, the Herons participated in Hour of Code.  It's an international project which encourages people to learn a little bit about how to write computer code.  Many different learning platforms have activities designed to teach folks some basics in about an hour of time and we used…

        Community Coffee and Special Persons' Day gave us a chance to share our school with the wider community.  The students take their responsibility as hosts very seriously.  We create hand written invitations for our neighbors (the houses and businesses we can walk to safely).  We practice…

The "culminating event" — we use these two words all of the time at Prairie Creek but rarely explain much about its role in our progressive setting.  According to the Herons' favorite dictionary, "to culminate" means to reach the highest point.  When we have a large, multi-faceted theme like our…

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…