Students in 6th grade have chosen their Q2 research topics; the
overall themes were music and/or their Individual Learning Plan (ILP)
they are working on in Guidance. Here's are some of the ones they came
up with:
The evolution of football equipment
Trajectory of Miley Cyrus' career
The importance of home runs in baseball
History of the violin
How Beethoven overcame deafness to continue composing and conducting
Ke$ha and Lady Gaga's costumes and how they contribute to the performance
How Justin Bieber's image has changed
Canadian v. U.S. hockey
Finished products will include a variety of
presentation formats, some of which we'll be able to post here. In the
meantime, we'll be learning about wikis, primary sources, website evaluation, and bibliographic citation, all as part of the inquiry process.
Each January, the American Library Association awards the Caldecott
Medal to the artist of "the most distinguished American picture book for
children." Who will win in 2014? Well, first- and second-graders are going to make their pick in library, and we'll see how our choice lines up with the national award.
After round one, the following were cleared to move on with near unanimity:
Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great Bob Shea
Despite a few concerns over the use of the word "stupid" and the "girly"-ness of unicorns, most students were highly entertained by this account of Goat realizing that Unicorn isn't all that bad to hang out with ... in fact, Unicorn is actually jealous of Goat in a few areas! The kids greatly enjoyed the spread where the protagonists imagine being superheroes: "Taste my cloven justice! You've been unicorned!"
We discussed magic tricks (if someone needs you to close your eyes while they're doing a trick, it's not a good trick) and trying new foods (like tomatoes, broccoli, and bacon ... although if I were P.M.'s mom, I would have encouraged her to NOT try the bacon so I could eat it all myself!).
That Is Not a Good Idea Mo Willems
Can Mo Willems do no wrong? From the silent movie design to the Greek
chorus of baby geese to the twist ending, this is another instant
classic. A lot of students recognized his name from the Pigeon and Elephant & Piggie books. And they loved this one just as much as they love those.
I am a huge Buster Keaton fan and plan to introduce him next week before checkout ... see 1:04 and 2:48 for dialogue cards and 2:18 for an amazing stunt.
The library often sounds a little like a zoo, but this past month, it
also sounded like a farm! I read a selection of animal sounds books to
the younger classes, including:
Because
students' animal sounds sometimes got a little ... enthusiastic ... I
taught them the conductor's cut-off signal. Which reminded me of The Sesame Street All-Animal Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa. The AM K students especially got a huge kick out of it and yelled for an encore.
And finally, what discussion of animal sounds can now be had without wondering ... What Does The Fox Say?
As a follow-up to our last lesson, when fourth-graders figured out Dewey Decimal System categories, this week they assigned a stack of topics to those categories. Each table got a set of "playing cards" that they had to place in the correct area of their "game board." Some of the cards were kind of tricky ... you could make the case for a certain subject to be in more than one Dewey category. So long as the students could explain their thinking, they got full credit.
700s are fun activities (aka Arts and Recreation)
900s are social studies (aka history and geography). Folk songs would be under music in the 700s.
However, this team explained that they thought folk songs were about culture,
which is social studies, which is 900s. Full credit for using their brains!
Here are the teams at work. I am happy to report that everyone participated fully, as the photos illustrate:
Double-checking the category labels posted at the front of the room.
