The Rookery

Since the first day of school, the Herons have asked when we were going to be doing "our play."  It's funny — while I was involved in drama in highschool and college, I didn't imagine I would do plays in my classroom.  But for the last four years, we have…

A recent blog by Cathy reminded me that this is a great time to expand the work we do with the 4/5s for social curriculum.  A few years ago, we had a thought provoking presentation by local counselor Nancy Gregerson on how to support children socially.  As Cathy said, this…

Our trip to the Mill City Museum was great.  We were able to apply a lot of what we had learned over the past two months to Minneapolis history.  Many thanks to Nicole Krenzel, Kerry Hanifl and Naomi Hilmas for chaperoning.  They all dove right in and helped the kids…

Thursday was a sad day for the Herons.  Connor Rohwer, the highschool senior who has spent every Tuesday and Thursday morning with us since September had to say goodbye.  This was the final week of the term and his schedule changes next week — Tuesdays and Thursday will be filled…

I have recently been re-reading a favorite series of essays by Eleanor Duckworth called The Having of Wonderful Ideas.  In it, Duckworth asserts that: the development of intelligence is a matter of having wonderful ideas. In other words, it is a creative affair. When children are afforded the occasions to…

I was so proud to be with the Herons tonight as they sang with and for the Northfield community at ARTech's Arts for Martin celebration.  There is a power in raising one's voice with others and it fills me with so much hope to watch our kids at an event…

As a tangential part of our industrial revolution study, I have begun to teach/review cursive letter formation.  I often write the morning message in cursive so that students become more comfortable reading it, but I'm ambivalent about taking large amounts of class time to teach cursive handwriting.  At least when…

I am very happy to report that the Herons have set a new record.  We set out chairs for lunch in an astonishing 1minute, 52 seconds.  When we began the year, four minutes seemed a very fast pace.  Our new record caused such a celebration that a staff member came…

Them's Fighting Words - Many thanks to Jana Hirsh (K.S.'s mom) who came in today and took on the role of Sarah Bagley, a mill operative who was involved in strikes and turn outs in the 1830s.  I asked her to foment some dissent and boy did she!  As a child read the article in "today's" paper about…

I've enjoyed having the opportunity to help the Herons do some data handling each Wednesday with the results from their Monday night surveys.  Usually, we've done quantitative analysis — counting certain responses, graphing them and using those data to help us make predictions or observations. Today, we tried our hand…