Tip of the Iceberg

Ever walked into a classroom and taken a look around to see students working hard on something? You can definitely tell they are focused, and sometimes it is quiet in the room giving the feel of whatever is happening a certain kind of gravity. I know that whenever we are in certain curricular structures, I have a hard time starting to confer with students as readers or writers because of how diligently everyone is working. However, this feel of hard work is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. The real work, the bulk of the work, really goes on beneath the surface and involves students planning, thinking, and carefully considering multiple options of how do approach and solve varied and diverse situations. I thought it might be cool to write a blog post that featured some of the times during the day that looked like students simply focusing diligently or quietly, but they were doing so much more than simply being silent and working hard.

Explorations:
One of the times during the day that I have recently found students really working hard as a group or individually was explorations. There are two projects I will be featuring in this blog post: the slime group and the Scratch group.

Our slime group convenes each morning to discuss how they will be making slime and testing the effects of different ingredients and ratios of those ingredients on different qualities of the slime they produce. They have been working hard to create their own research teams who will each carry out a trial changing one variable each to see how those specific changes affect the slime they make. The first slime trial will be making Fluffy Slime, and they will be using different brands and forms (gel or foam) of shaving cream to make different kinds of slime. This is a fabulous way that we can review and practice the scientific method in ways that are real and relevant to them already. Many of our students are practicing slime scientists in their own lives at home, and are leading the way in class with the subtle shifts in slime production that can create completely different textures, colors, and even smells.

The group of students using Scratch are working to make (yes, I said make) different animated video games with the program that teaches them how to write computer code. Hamilton gave us an update recently in morning meeting on some different aspects of a game the students in the Scratch group were working on together. They are having to write code to see if they can create the conditions that the game itself speeds up the action, music, and point gaining opportunities as the player gains points. The challenge is for them to use the coding tools that the program provides, to essentially now improvise their own combination of those in order to create a speed up in the game. We are all eager to see how this turns out!

Fairy Tales:
When we started studying Fairy Tales, I could not have imagined what all might lay under the tip of this iceberg! We began studying Fairy Tales together. We read some Fairy Tales together, on our own, and even did a study of Cinderella-type stories from many cultures and places all over the world.  We came up with our own definitions of Fairy Tales while reading the Land of Stories books which are conglomerations of Fairy Tales, similar in feel to the movie Shrek. As we started to write our own Fairy Tales, many of us were writing things very similar to the Land of Stories, however, these stories did not feel like Fairy Tales that we knew traditionally.  As we read and reread our own stories and the Fairy Tales and worked some with Mrs. Waugh, our reading coach, we began to see a difference between how our stories went and how traditional Fairy Tales go. Our original definition dealt with some of the things Fairy Tales had in them like magic, things in sets of 3, or royalty. However, we had yet to define what made a piece of writing feel like a Fairy Tale and progress like a Fairy Tale. This feel of the process and progression of a Fairy Tale became our inquiry. We decided to very slowly read through the traditional text of the Little Mermaid, a tale many of us knew from the Disney version, and see what we noticed and connected about how Fairy Tales go from this story. In doing so, we became experts on nuances of this genre like how the main character is often the youngest daughter who becomes isolated from friends or family members on a quest to find love and an idea of herself. She is often led by a mentor character to discover what she needs in order to find her destiny. These detailed aspects of these tales are helping us now produce some truly expert Fairy Tales. This study has also given us the chance to re-see and even re-write some of the things that are typical Fairy Tale culture, rescued princesses for example, in ways that help us to use story to open a world of possibility for the young readers for whom we write.

Math:
This week in math we will finish up work with multiplication and division strategies that we have been working on for the past several weeks. Many of us have uncovered the ways in which traditional multiplication and division methods may have been constructed -- finding the rest of the iceberg below the surface of doing the math problem. We are practicing considering how many ways we can use other problems to make solving larger division and multiplication problems really easy. Those problems we use are called Cluster Problems. They "cluster" around the original problem in a way that gets us close to what an answer might be and solve the rest of the problem from there. For example if I were doing 1598/32, I might try to do 32 x 50 because I know that I am trying to get something close to 1500 and 30 x 50 gives me 1500. So, I'll try 32 x 50, that gives me 1600, and that is a little bit over the actual number I need, but just barely. I will then try 32 x 49, so I'll take away one set of 32 from the 1600. That will give me 1568. If I take that out of the original dividend of 1598, I get 30 left over as a remainder. This work we have been doing in uncovering the potential for thinking into a division problem helps us to consider reasonableness of an answer in ways that long division simply does not allow for within it's process of moving digits from one place to another.

Here you see the slime group planning and pricing their ingredients for this week's trials.

 This week on our library visit, the library staff was preparing for their Harry Potter event this month by making slime. We got to be consultants on production and texture.

The library staff member who we helped make the slime let us keep some to take and make a part of our sample for this week's set of experiments.