The Rookery

This summer I visited the PROMYS program for a day.  It's a six week program for teachers and advanced high school students that explores number theory at a college level.  The kids are there because they want to spend their summer doing math.  The teachers are there because they want…

Blue Books On the second day of school, the 4/5s received their Blue Books.  The 5th graders were amazed at how skinny the books were.  By the end of the year, most of them will be stuffed, quite literally, with what we have learned.  We took a few moments to…

The first day always flashes by.  About two and a half hours into the morning, a child asked me how long we'd been at school.  I told him.  His eyes got big, "Gosh, it feels like 10 minutes!"  Every moment is precious and begins to create our community.  Who are…

This summer, my family made a trip to the City Museum in St. Louis.  It's hard to describe.  It's like a giant sculpture you can climb through, explore and get lost in.  There's a giant whale, rebar tunnels, underground labyrinths, a limestone cave, a 10 story swirly slide, a giant…

The Herons ventured out on the Oregon Trail on Thursday.  Well, actually, we loaded our wagons on Thursday and set out on Friday.  We had a few spare hours in the schedule before May Day – not enough for a full blown theme but enough for a short exploration and…

Yesterday, we began a mini-theme on lichen.  Let me take a moment to rhapsodize about lichen.  They're crazy.  They are an organism that contains both fungus and algae – the fungus provides the structure for the organism.  The algae (or, in some cases,cyanobacteria) make food for the organism through photo…

Today I took a moment to reflect with the Herons on all the work they have been doing on their projects.  In the flurry of deadlines and revising and editing, it can be easy to loose sight of the tremendous job they have all been doing.  The seriousness and focus…

Our world is incredibly interconnected.  Just two hundred years ago, the majority of people never ventured further than a day away from the place they were born.  (It's probably even less than 200 years ago, but that seemed like a safe bet.)  Now, I can send a message instantly anywhere…

Many of the Herons wrote at the end of our computer science theme that they really enjoyed figuring out how to do things for themselves.  As we began our straw rocket theme, I wanted to honor that.  I gave them a straw, some paper for fins (if they wished) and…

There is something incredibly exciting about computer programming.  We have come to rely on these magic boxes that just "do" things without us knowing how.  But, programming (or coding as it's more often called) lets us take back control.  Suddenly, we're the bosses again.  We get to tell the computer…