The Rookery

So, as I right this, Prairie Creek's two student teachers are at my board, coloring in squiggly designs.  Why?  As soon as we got back from Babe (which was a lot of fun), I settled the Herons down for some more discrete math work.  This Friday, at our faculty professional…

Every year I am struck by the power of Arts for Martin.  It is so moving to see a community come together and celebrate the victories that have been hard won and commit to the challenges that are still before us.  Our students began the night by singing for liberty…

For our engineering unit, Amy, Cathy, Rachel (our student teacher) and I decided to push a little bit.  Our kids are very used to working in groups and they've become very good at it.  Usually, teachers structure groups that will ensure success — a mix of experience and inexperience, leader…

The personal project season has begun in the Herons.  The fifth graders are well underway (topics chosen, questions pondered, resources gathered) and the fourth graders have just begun.  Each fourth grader met with his or her fifth grade mentor on Friday to solidify their topic and start developing questions.  The…

On Friday, the Herons worked on some more topics in discrete math — knot and map theory.  I stumbled across an amazing video of mathematical doodling, did some research and shared what I'd learned so far with the Herons.  I don't intend for them to master this math — indeed,…

A recent discussion among the teachers regarding the Pledge of Allegiance lead me to reflect on how we prepare kids to be citizens at Prairie Creek.  I realized that it might not be obvious to someone who didn't spend every day in the classroom how much time we spend on…

"Base times height" "One half base times height" These are the formulas for the area of a parallelogram and the area of a triangle respectively.  Even if you haven't bought carpet for a triangular room recently, they're probably rattling around in your brain somewhere.  What might not still be rattling…

"What do you mean we're done with Greece?!" This was the outcry when I congratulated the Herons on a job well done and began to talk about how we were going to reflect on our work.  Many students wanted to dig more deeply still and felt they still had a…

After a quick pep talk at Prairie Creek, the Heron's decided to enjoy their campout to its fullest even though it didn't include an overnight.  We had a very full day which included getting on the cross country skis for the first time, studying the effects of friction and gravity…

To say that there was a palpable sense of excitement in the Herons today would be a gross understatement.  This was a very big day — our trip to the Guthrie.  We had prepared by reading several versions of "A Christmas Carol," We compared them and talked about the decisions…