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.
monthly themes
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!
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.
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...
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!
In December we departed a little from the usual. Renata's class of 3rd, 4th and 5th graders studied Salt, while the rest of the school worked on Author Studies. The Kindergarteners picked the poet and storybook author Kate DiCamillo, and read, talked and created art avidly throughout the month. The 1st/2nd grade class studied Eve Bunting. This amazing and versatile author sparked experiences that took the children into the woods to decorate a tree with seeds, dry fruit and popcorn for the birds and animals, had them dissecting owl pellets to discover the nature of the owl's dinner and identify the tiny bones they found there, and combining drama and writing to come up with expressive storytelling inspired by Bunting's use of voice in her work. Renata's class read as voraciously as always, and explored Salt as if they'd never heard of it before. Rock salt, sea salt, Himalayan salt, black lava salt, salt crystals, salt in the body, salted salmon and beef (yes, this was an experiment) - in fact, they had so much fun designing and conducting experiments that I still see them going on now, even though I am writing this in January and there is a lot of Theatre and Puppet action going on also... So, on to January!
Even the most amazing creative genius was a child once. Our students are following in Leonardo's footsteps as they explore the natural world, searching the woods for small, delicate pieces of nature to study and draw. They lie under trees as he did when he was a child (we are grateful for the amazing November sunshine!) to listen and look, watching for birds (Leonardo's favorite) and considering how they fly. Our classes have been learning about Leonardo's inventions that could not be built during his lifetime because technology was lacking, and teaming up to invent new machines that will be built hundreds of years into the future. (Flying buildings and floating traffic lights will be big, just as a heads-up. Invest now.) We have made and used abaci for math, and tangentially learned about another Leonardo - Leonardo Fibonacci and the number pattern he brought to light. Art abounds as children study and paint, building on the foundation they laid in our Renaissance month (you can read more about that on Ruth's art blog). And what's next? The children are most keen to do more and more inventing, which I'm sure will spark off new and unusual ideas when they come to do their Simple Machines theme in February.
Flight is many things. It's learning to make an origami bird, it's investigating Bernoulli's principle (which helps explain how an airplane achieves thrust) through experiments with balloons, paper, pingpong balls, funnels... It's testing models we have made and practicing math as we measure and graph comparative distances they can travel. But it's also the flight of the imagination experienced when we develop stories in the woods with Philip Waters from The Eden Project, or work with poet Christian Bök when he visits on the 20th. It's discussing the story of Icarus, identifying with the excitement and fear of flying too close to the sun. It's physics and math, poetry and writing, art and music and a lot of pure joy. And it leads us from the Renaissance to Leonardo da Vinci next month, whose design for a flying machine inspires us to dream and explore the limits of the possible.