The Rookery

Personal project presentations take a long time.  We devote three full mornings and an afternoon to watching student work.  That could seem like a lot of instructional time – until you realize how much learning is going on in the audience.  In the past week, the Herons have gotten a…

The master chart we use to keep track of our work. Today (Monday) was a great day – three Herons rocked their honors project presentations and the four fourth grade presenters more had such a good time presenting that one student told me, "I'm so sad that I'm finished!"  But…

As part of our microbes theme, we just finished All in a Drop, How Antony Van Leeuwenhoek Discovered an Invisible World.  Big shout out thanks to Lori Alexander, the author, who sent us an advanced copy (the book won't be published until August.) of All in A Drop Van Leeuwenhoek…

Index card questions from this year's puberty education lessons. When we first began teaching puberty education to our fourth and fifth graders – we were nervous.  We were designing the curriculum based on best practices and after consulting with the community at the time but it felt like a big…

Today my exploration math class did something unusual – we spent almost all of class on the computers.  In this time of screen ubiquity, Prairie Creek has been careful about how it uses technology.  There's a lot of junk out there.  A screen can't substitute for the rich experiences of…

Two students organizing the branches of their tree.  Fourth and fifth graders often take the tree analogy quite literally. We are at a new stage in our personal projects.  Initial research is wrapping up and students are organizing their notes to write.  But how do you know when you have…

I think I've been to Wolf Ridge with our fifth graders fifteen times now.  One would think that it would be old hat, routine.  But it's not.  Every class is based on discovery and on finding things to wonder about.  That's what makes the learning so powerful and so authentic…

“People have perpetuated blackface because we don’t teach minstrel history. If these people had ever been exposed to it in a safe classroom environment, they would know better.”  This statement from Rhae Lynn Barnes, a professor of American cultural history at Princeton, struck home for me this weekend.  I had…

  A formidable group…about to launch snowballs at me! We ended December a special Forest School lesson.  Brandon came in and taught the Herons about the perfect cooking fire and we put together hobo packets of potatoes, butter and seasoning salt.  They were delicious (and perfectly browned…thanks, Brandon!)  The Herons…

Fractions. Even for adults, the word can bring on a shudder. Often, we were taught mnemonics to help us remember things that weren't supposed to make sense: “If the bottom is bigger, the number is smaller,” “The big number goes on the bottom” or “Ours is not to wonder why,…