Education

“I think that education should be preparing you to go out into the world--so that you will be ready to give something to the world.  It should also be fun so that people understand it better.”-K, Grade 6

Ted Talk: John Hunter, Teaching with the World Peace Games:

Know Your Onion! Multi-media depictions of Joy Harjo and Pablo Neruda...

Grade Level: Middle School and High School

Objective: To engage with the food poetry we encountered earlier this semester in a different way.

This week our community is in the midst of a film festival.  One Tuesday, my environmental literature class watched Billy Collin's Ted talk on the poetry videos he worked collaboratively on during his time as Poet Laureate.  We discussed the possibility of creating our own poetry videos but decided instead to use different mediums (paint, charcoal, pastel, photography) to explore poems we'd read earlier this semester.  The students divided into two groups and began working.  I spent time with the group is working to represent Pablo Neruda's poem "Ode to an Onion."  Next Tuesday both groups will reveal their final project, displaying it in a public space.

 

 

More Geometric Art with Lisa Maren Thompson

Grade Level: Elementary/Middle School

Objective: To learn about elements of art through the act of constructing a 3-D sculpture out of geometric and organic shapes

Learning in Public: Celtic Snacks, Sculptures, and Roundhouses

Grade Level: Middle School

Objective: To share our learning about the Ancient Celts through models, sculptures, and snacks

Table display in Holden Village's dining hall

 

A. and K worked together on this round house.  K had the idea to use Popsicle sticks for the walls, A constructed the roof, the base, and the garden.  She also sculpted the pigs using bake-able clay

A gold torc, likes the ones worn by Celts going into battle, sculpted and painted by A.

Ancient Celtic oatcakes

Beginning French Lessons

Grade Level: Middle School

Objective: To begin creating visual associations between objects in our classroom and their names in French

Environmental Literature: Studying food by analyzing cookbooks (worksheet + helpful vocabulary)

Grade Level: High School

Objective: To empower students to apply their analytic skills to a variety of forms of writing they may encounter in everyday life

Cookbooks: A literary analysis

“Eating is an agricultural act”-Wendall Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating"

Everything makes an argument—our literature and our advertisements, our sermons and poems, our news broadcasts and our popular films. Today we're going to continue our conversation about food and the environment by analyzing a number of cookbooks. Work in groups to answer the following questions. For each answer your group should be able to provide concrete evidence from the text.

1-What is the tone of the piece? How does the author establish ethos (personal credibility)? What is his/her intention? (To attack or defend? To praise or blame? To teach, to delight, or to persuade?)

Organic and Geometric Shape Sculptures

Grade Level: Elementary and Middle School

Objective: To learn about geometric and organic shapes in a sculptural art project

One of our volunteer art teachers, Lisa Maren Thompson, has been working with the students on a very exciting art project using geometric concepts to create sculptural art.

Movement models with Clare: Forest Fires, Glaciers, and Plate Tectonics

Grade Level: Elementary and Middle School

Objective: To reinforce science learning through making "movement models" with dancer and science educator Clare

One of the luckiest things about working in a remote school in a place where people visit and vacation is getting to take advantage of all the talented teachers who come to Holden from all over the country.  Last week, a dancer and teacher named Clare who works in the Chicago area teaching students science through dance visited our village. She came into our science class and did several movement models with the students, teaching them how much already know about science by giving them the opportunity to put their knowledge in motion.

Some things I loved about the way Clare taught science:
-She kept the kids' bodies and minds engaged--they spent almost the entire class moving, visualizing, imagining, and problem solving
-She let them puzzle through the questions she asked rather than providing answers.  They learned by struggling, problem solving, and collaborating.
-She engaged almost every learning style.  The kids listened to music, made models with their bodies, and painted each others' movement.

Exploring atoms and molecules

Grade Level: Elementary

Objective: To learn about atoms and molecules by watching the way they behave in different situations.

Boiling snow to watch the way water can change from a solid, to a liquid to a gas

To learn about atoms and molecules we:
-experimented with oil and vinegar, watching the way differently polarized molecules moved with and against each other
-made a movement model to show how molecules move in a solid, a liquid, and a gas
-watched water change from a solid, to a liquid, to a gas
-watched a Bill Nye video on atoms

Moving our classroom

It's been a crazy week with very little time for blogging, recording, and sharing our work.  The kids and I have organized a knowledge bowl, hosted a number of guests, worked on art, began learning French, and had a tea party with our principal. Due to limited power we also moved our classroom into a warmer space.  So far we've enjoyed the additional room and the coziness of our new (consistently) heated learning space.

Some parts of our science center that the kids decided to move into our new space

Enjoying our new classroom

The View from Saturday: Knowledge Bowl

Grade Level: 6

Objective: To more fully engage with E.L Konigsburg's The View from Saturday by creating an event based on the academic bowl the characters in the book participate in.

The kids and I created a Knowledge Bowl for our community based on the academic bowl in The View from Saturday.  A and K made up their own questions (using atlases and a National Geographic book of facts), placed them in categories, and assigned value to each question.  They also came up with door prizes the raffle off to participants. We made snacks and we able to draw in a big crowd of teenagers, college students, and adults to come out, play, and support the kids.

Some sample knowledge bowl questions:

Science:

100:

Q: What is the hardest mineral?

A: Diamonds

Q: Plants get their energy from _________________?

A: The sun

Q: What is the name for a baby goat?

A: A Kid

200:

Q: Humans and slugs share more than 50% of their_________.

A: Genes

Q: Butterflies taste with what part of their body?

A: Their feet

Q: What is the waste product of photosynthesis?

A: Oxygen

Friction, friction, friction

Grade Level: Elementary and Middle School

Objective: To "see" the effects of friction through a series of hands-on experiment

  

Experiment 1:

1-Take two pieces of paper

2-Crumple up one of the pieces of paper

3-Stand on a chair and drop both pieces 

4-Which falls fastest?  Why?

Experiment 2 (taken from Mythbusters):

1-Take two large paperback books (100+ pages)

2-Interlace the pages from both books together

3-Continue to lace the pages together until they're all combined

4-Try to pull the books apart.  What happens?  Why?

Experiment 3:

1-Fill a water bottle with rice

2-Stick a chopstick in the rice, pull it out.  How easy is it?

3-Tap the water bottle, till the rice settles.  Then add more rice.

4-Stick the chopstick into the rice again.  Try to pull it out.  What happens?  Why?

 

Lacing book pages together

 

Preparing experiments

Holding a water bottle up by a chopstick

We also experimented with this toy car, sending it down the ramp with different levels of friction