While the elementary school students are digging into the study of different genres (Appalachian folk tales, poetry, science fiction, trickster tales, oh my!) the middle school students have begun their two-month long exploration of Ancient Civilizations. The oldest story on record, Gilgamesh, is being recreated as a multimedia play production. Excitement is building around acting, filming, creation of monsters, backdrops and more. Meanwhile the students are studying hard with the development of their individual projects in mind.
monthly themes
October: Genre Studies/Ancient Civilizations
September: Farm to Table
Our first theme of the year takes the students from seed to harvest to cooking to eating to doing the dishes... in many different cultures and times in history. Stay tuned for details!
March: Tools
From the mundane to the fantastic, the students looked at tools in a new way. Tinkering with machines, taking them apart, putting them back together, putting the pieces together in different ways, making little robots, making big robots - lots of deconstruction and construction went on this month with make labs led by All Hands Active. Middle school students studied the evolution of tools through the ages and used their projects to introduce the theme to the younger children. Kids encountered antique tools and discovered their uses, and wrote tool's-eye-view stories about their imaginary adventures. The month's experience was an eye-opener: tools for art, tools for music, tools for science, tools for math... chidren encountered and used many tools both familiar and new to them to support their explorations of different academic subjects. Read about some of them here. Kindergartners honed their time-telling skills; older children explored science with the help of visiting experts. Tools led to American legend in music and to techniques and imagination in art, It was an amazingly rich month, full of invention and association. So much fun, so much intensely meaningful work. Kudos to all!
December The Human Body
In December the kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade students all kicked off the month with a presentation from some exceptional teachers: our 5th and 6th graders. The older students presented their Human Body iSkinless projects, each one going in depth into a different body system. The whole month was filled with expert visitors engaging in all kinds of exploratory scientific learning with the students, from roleplaying the adventure of a virus up against the immune system to using ultraviolet light to identify the presence of bacteria. The Hands-On Museum team came in to do a fascinating workshop with our 3rd-6th graders. Students from EMU came and worked with our 1st and 2nd graders to write creative (hilarious) fiction based on the human body. Literature ranged from Darwin's Origin of the Species to Kipling's How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin. The work that was done was far-reaching and interconnected. You can see a map of how it all fit together here.
November: Author Studies (The Human Body)
November brings a whirlwind of reading, from local and modern (Patricia Pollacco, Joan Blos) to far away and ancient (the letters of Pliny) to a combination (Gerald McDermott, who is originally from Detroit but now lives in California and retells traditional stories from around the world). Activites spin in all directions, from writing our own books (of course!) and illustrating them, to gorgeous, atmospheric, kinetic musical activities based on reading (want to know why the music room is dark? Read about it here) to investigations of culture and history (Yes! Another excuse for cooking... which takes us to math.... and science...) Adventures with Alice and Lewis Carroll are starting, and it's a mystery to know where that will lead - the mathematical, logical, philosophical wonders of those stories are mindboggling. In the meantime the middle school students have started work on The Human Body, including complex anatomy, studies of Darwin, and advances in medical science. Check out B's blog here. The elementary students will catch up with them next month, by which time the middle school kids will have their projects ready to share and teach!
March: Poetry
During Poetry month, many forms of poetry were explored in the school, from limericks to "I am" poems to haiku. The oldest children began the month with "Jabberwocky" and a discussion of invented words and onomatopoeia (as did Mrs Carpenter's class), and then turned in the opposite direction and discovered they knew more than they thought when it came to deciphering the imagery of a Middle English poem! In Mrs. Carpenter's class, the children wrote "I Am" poems, and mailed them to penpals in California. Little ones did poetry workshops with parents who are also poets! Different classes took walks in the County Farm Park to search for signs of spring and poetic inspiration (read about it here); human activities mark the changing seasons, too, as the children realized when they saw cyclists and the remains of a prescribed burn in the park. Who knew ashes could be a sign of spring? The whole school explored comic poems and serious ones, and wrote lots of poetry of our own.
February: Simple Machines
In February our school turned into a laboratory. Physics experiments were happening everywhere as children learned about simple machines and force. The children tried out pulleys, levers, inclined planes and more - all the different simple machines. They learned about them by pounding nails, moving things around with pulleys, and all kinds of other activities. They visited the Hands-On Museum for a lab, and they looked at the science behind it all - a parent even brought in a DVD from Japan about simple machines. (As a side benefit the children learned how to say "simple machines" in Japanese...) The film inspired the older students to try their hands making Rube Goldberg machines with building materials they found in their room - for a while it was hard to get around in there! The 1st and 2nd grade class worked with a variety of simple machines to see first hand how the tools "make work easier" and worked on a project involving lots of trial and error as they tried to come up with a machine that could lift candy - without using their hands! As children were learning about and experimenting with simple machines at school, they were inventing their own machines at home with combinations of simple machines (now becoming complex). Then, one glorious day, all the inventions came to school and we had an Invention Convention. The machine that fed the guinea pig, the machine that played a drum - all the amazing things we saw and tried out that day are the inventions of the future...
January: Theatre and Puppetry
This was a month full of field work as we kicked off with a whole-school trip to the Dreamland Theater in Ypsilanti for a puppet show that starred the Mark Maynard puppet. (As Mark is a parent at our school, this was huge fun for all!) The students met and interacted with puppets and puppeteers and returned fired up with ideas for the month ahead. They compared the PuppetArt (Detroit) performance of The Firebird with the live-action Wild Swan production of the same story. They attended workshops, visited museums and considered their place in the cultural history of puppetry as they made rod puppets, paper bag puppets, and puppets from clay, envelopes, sticks, and their hands! Read about some of their adventures here. And, of course, they devised theatre and puppet shows themselves, from shadow puppets in Music to a dramatization of Cendrillon in French to a version of the Mahabharata performed by the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders at Vitosha Guest Haus. This amazing piece used live actors as well as masks and puppets created by the students. Read about it here. And while the older children were reading the Mahabharata, younger students were reading Pinocchio and The Magician’s Boy, and using puppets to explore various literary themes and character traits. Art, music, literature, cultural studies, languages and drama all came together in a creative whirl as the children explored ideas from concept to performance. What an amazing month!
