The Rookery

Today was a beautiful day.  Excited chatter spilled out of classrooms and filled the halls.  Children held the hand of their grandparents or friends, sharing special spaces in the school.  And then the children sang together, raising their voices and stamping and clapping.  For me, they chased the shadows away.…

Apologies to The Clash, I know it's "Rock the Casbah" but I keep singing it this way instead.  It seemed appropriate for today's theme work where we were definitely rocking Kashgar. Before recess we left Merv and crossed 200 miles of desert.  I took the opportunity to use the big…

This morning at our all school gathering, the students huddled around a campfire (of paper logs) while Amy Brown told an Ojibwe story about Nanabozho stealing fire from the Sky Giant.  They were silent, hardly moving as the story unfolded, Amy's voice sometimes a quiet whisper in the otherwise soundless room.…

probability:
the chance that something will occur (how likely it is that an event will happen)  With games of chance set up on every visible surface, the carnival-goers streamed into the Prairie Creek gym wide-eyed tickets in hand. Each of the 4th and 5th graders had a game that they had developed set…

  Lena, a tea shop owner, shows Hrolccof some very expensive saffron threads. The caravan is on its way.  We stopped last week in Constantinople where we learned some Greek, tried our hand at making felt, visited the Hagia Sophia, listened to the duduk, learned about bird liming and Greek…

General Resources: Silk Road Travel Journal – Interactive site from American Natural History Museum. Silk Road Music – Make your own music on instruments that spread along the Silk Road Silk Road Fables – Hear stories from Baghdad, Samarkand and Xi’an Silk Road Maps  Silk Road Maps – from a different…

The Herons began a new theme last week.  The year is 800 and they have been asked by Charlemagne to travel to Seres, the land of silk, and discover the secrets of silk making.  Each member of the group has a specialty and will contribute to the success of the…

One of my favorite math subjects to teach is probability (the Herons groan when I say that…whatever we're doing in math I tend to declare my favorite.)  Probability is especially fun with fourth and fifth graders because they are intellectually able to comprehend mathematical probability but developmentally they are not…

Recently, I've been reading a book called Wild Play, by David Sobel.  In it, he encourages parents to allow their children unstructured time in the woods with as few constraints as possible.  He feels this allows children to discover the natural world more authentically and more deeply.  He also feels…

Today the 4/5s were introduced to the on-line version of the math MCA.  It's early in the year and we took care to remind them that this was an opportunity to get used to the tools and the layout of the on-line test.  It's also a chance for us as…