TED Talk for kids: Part I: Adora Spivak

Grade Level: 6

Objective: To inspire questioning, thoughtfulness, and creativity through an empowered and assertive young role model. (Bonus: She's also from Washington!)

Daring, Defiant, Free: Mark Jenkins' essay on superclimbers in Yosemite

Grade Level: High School

Objective: Students will analyze Mark Jenkins' article Daring. Defiant. Free. A new generation of superclimbers is pushing the limits in Yosemite in the context of the writers they've read in environmental literature.

Today we:

-Looked at some of the first photographs and paintings of Yosemite

-Wrote about the climbers in Mark Jenkins essay comparing and contrasting them to John Muir

-Watched a short video clip about Alex Honnold

-Discussed Mark Jenkins' article 

Student Poetry

Grade Level: 2nd

Jar Garden

By M.

I love the way my plants

grow

and I like

the way my plants

get ready for the winter.

They’re like sprouting

tulips in the garden

pushing their way through

the earth to the sunshiney air.

I Hiked to Hart Lake

By M.

On my way there

I saw an interesting pine cone

a chipmunk must of chewed it.

I threw it in my pocket

as fast

as I could

and then

I kept going

and going

until I arrived at school,

and put the pine cone

beside branches

and that’s the story

of my pine cone.

Some Nature, Some drawing, Some Poetry

"We have lost our sense of time. We believe that we can add meaning to life by making things go faster. We have an idea that life is short — and that we must go fast to fit everything in. But life is long. The problem is that we don't know how to spend our time wisely."-Carlo Petrini: Founder of the Slow Food Movement (September 2008, quoted in the magazine 'Fast Company')

Grade Level: Elementary

Objective: Students will read (and write!) poetry attentively, paying attention to language, imagery, and the poetic devices poets use.

Today we:
-Read "Luna Moth" by J. Patrick Lewis and "Invention" by Billy Collins (I read the poems out loud twice, the first reading students closed their eyes and imagined the images in the poem, the second reading students looked at the poem as I read, picking out words and phrases they particularly enjoyed)
-Created a venn diagram comparing and contrasting the poems
-Created artwork for the poems
-Wrote our own poems inspired by objects in our Nature Discovery Center

A library and a garden--our seeds start SPROUTING!

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." (Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil.)” ― Cicero, Letters to His Friends, Vol 2: Books 7-12

Snickers Bar Science and the Crayon Rock Cycle

Grade Level: Elementary

Objective: Students will build on their knowledge of plate tectonics and volcanoes, learning about the rock cycle.

Key concepts: Weathering, Erosion, Deposition,  Sediment, Sedimentary Rocks, Metamorphic Rocks, and Igneous Rocks

Today we:

-Did a BBC interactive tutorial on the rock cycle

-Used a fun-size Snickers bar to demonstrate chemical weathering (with our saliva), physical weathering (with our teeth), erosion (swallowing), and deposition (the Snickers bar in our stomach)

-Created our own rock cycle using crayons...

We:

Shaved the crayons (aka weathering) and moved the shavings onto tin foil (erosion and deposition)

Pounded the "sediment" (crayon shavings) with a hammer (aka made sedimentary rocks through compaction)

Hammered(/compacted) the "sedimentary rocks" again then floated them in a mason jar of hot water to make "metamorphic rocks"

Heated the "rocks" on a hot plate and poured them over ice imitating the magma/lava process which creates igneous rocks 

Day of the Dead Boxes

As an art/social studies interdisciplinary activity K. and I created Day of the Dead boxes to accompany the Day of the Dead/Halloween/All Saints/All Souls Day Social Studies we did earlier this week.