The Rookery

At Prairie Creek, personal projects are authentic, real research.  We don't set out the topic for the students and tell them what they must find (although it would be infinitely easier to say that everyone had to do a biography and find the birthdate, birth place, and three significant accomplishments…

We missed you today.  I love the bustle of culminating events; the urgency of the students as they set up and teach their "customers" about what they've learned.  One of the things I most love is the students' opportunity to "wow" their parents with their professionalism and how they're able…

I love teaching math.  I was an English major in college and one of the reasons that I became an elementary teacher was because I would get to teach math (and weave all the subjects together and really get to know a single class instead of teaching English to 150…

As students get older, their social worlds become much more complex and nuanced.  Things that were once black and white – teasing, friendships, rules – begin to shade into more gray areas.  This is appropriate — developmentally they are more ready to understand context, tone, nuance and exceptions to the…

A picture of dead man's fingers in a kindergartener's journal after going to the Mycology Museum. On Wednesday, the Herons taught the rest of our community about what we had been learning.  The event had the excitement and energy that I always love about culminations.  There were missing copies to…

It has been way, way too long.  On Thursday, I looked across the Herons' room to see students bustling this way and that.  Several were headed to the basement to find puffball costumes.  Two were climbing the spinning Albero on the playground to figure out how much paper it would…

On our very first day of Forest School we went on a mushroom hunt.  I wasn't sure what we'd find – although the week before I'd found at least a few mushrooms around.  Within moments, there were squeals of delight. A patch of giant mushrooms were growing under a pine,…

  My "S" Hook This summer, I spent a day – a whole day – learning how to make…a hook. At the end of six hours of hot sweaty work I had something that takes a professional blacksmith four to five minutes to make.  And frankly, it's not a great…

This whole week as I prepare to write narratives, the first lines of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" have been on repeat in my head: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand  And…

We have a shared blog this year – but I realized as I was writing and placing in pictures that there will be moments, many moments, that are the Heron's alone (just as there will be Kestrel and Robin moments that are not duplicated in our classroom.). I'll use this…