The Rookery

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…

The Herons begin our morning with independent reading.  Each child reads a just right book or article — one that is interesting with the right amount of challenge. Already in class, we've had several discussions about finding your learning zone (zone of proximal development for all of you Vygotsky fans). …

Today we planted a lot of seeds – surveys, accountable talk, truchet tiles, Morning Girl (our read aloud book.)  We started talking about what it meant to be a Heron and what might be the guidelines we wanted to live by.  We talked about leadership and the special work of…

As a faculty, we begin every school year reviewing key elements of our practice.  Some things, like the required OSHA training about extension cords, are good reminders but not necessarily inspiring (to be fair, it's about more than extension cords.)  But we also look at the teaching standards we've agreed…

My home read aloud right now is The Summer Book by Tove Jannson.  It's a slow and lyrical book with no plot to speak of but it's also profound (and funny) in its way. It follows the everyday lives of a girl, Sophia, and Grandmother on a small island in the…