The Rookery

A chickadee welcomes students. As I walked out of the school last Friday, I was greeted by this cheery chickadee – peeking out of a nest in the planters that welcome children to school every day.  Liz had been at it again.  Quietly and without fail, she changes our planters…

A recent math conversation made possible by math fluency. Today I went out driving with my sixteen year old son.  It is fair to say this is not yet his favorite activity.  (I was the one who added that "yet" — he is pretty sure it will never be something…

Off to adventure. Our school has gone to Wolf Ridge for thirty years.  I've gone about fifteen times.  And yet, I still get excited. Tucked up on the North Shore, Wolf Ridge is, of course, beautiful — sometimes breathtakingly so.  I will never forget the sky-brightening meteor that streaked across…

On Friday, I decided it was time to discuss the phenomenon of 4th and 5th grade lawyering*.  Several conflicts had popped up, both among children and between children and adults that all had the same cause – individuals jumping into a defensive pose when asked to stop something because they…

Speaking of Faith(s) It started out at as a read aloud – an excerpt on Christianity from Mary Pope Osborne's One World, Many Religions.  I wanted to share information about the early Christian church with the Herons and give them practice asking questions about beliefs.  Before we got started, I briefly…

The Silk Road The year is 800 CE and Charlemagne is ruling the Holy Roman Empire from Aachen.  The silk fabric that is traded in Aachen is exquisite, dyed with bright colors and interwoven with gold.  But by the time the silk has arrived in Europe, it is very, very…

Problem of the Week has been a part of my practice since my student teaching days.  In New York at the time, all students were asked to show the pathway they took to solving a multi-step problem.  They were only given partial credit for a correct numeric answer – the…

Midyear through my first year teaching, the U.S. conducted a four day bombing of Iraq called Operation Desert Fox.  The lead up to it had been fraught and my students came in very concerned.  At our class meeting, several of the students mentioned that their parents had said we were…

    At Forest School on Wednesday, I had the Herons look at an infographic from a recent issue of The Economist.  I didn't give them much information about it – just the image below and the text from the inside of the cover that explained the creator had used color to…

In these past few weeks, I've been struck by what the Herons bring into the classroom.  They are fonts of interesting facts and fascinating connections and seem to have something to say about just about everything. With this in mind, the first kind of figurative language we reviewed in reading…