The Rookery

We Made it Xi'an! Last Wednesday, we mounted the camels one last time and headed through the Jade Gates to Xi'an.  We passed through the Gobi desert and faced only one sandstorm (a roll of 1 on our 20 sided die) and then saw a long wall rising on the…

Today was a special day in the Herons.  For weeks the fifth graders have been pestering me, "When will you give us our mentees?"  Last year, they were guided through their personal projects by a fifth grader and now they were eager to pass on the knowledge they learned. I…

  A magic square from Albrecht Durer's Melencolia Special Persons' Day has a fragmented schedule.  Students are either performing or serving or giving tours (or giddiliy anticipating one of those things).  Visitors drift in and out.  It's wonderful but it is not usually a day when we do our highest…

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…