Geometry and Art

Wassily Kandinsky, Serious Joke/Serio Divertido, 1930

One of the focuses of our school is arts integration. I'm very new to the idea of true arts integration, but I've been exploring through drama and visual art this year. My wonderful friend, Katie, gave me some Kandinsky prints she uses for teaching geometry. Tomorrow we'll be exploring, comparing, and contrasting different kinds of triangles, how they are used in math, art, and the rest of the world.

Here's our morning message for tomorrow. In English it says:

Good morning, mathematicians, This painting by Wassily Kandinsky is called Serious-Joke." What do you notice about the painting?

I've left spaces for their comments andd drawings about the polygons and non-polygons found in this painting.

I love these paintings, and I hope the kids will too.

Next up: Looking for an artist who incorporates more 3-D figures into his/her art. Any suggestions?

And I'm back....

I've taken a long sabbatical from blogging, but I feel ready to jump back in the water!

One thing I've been thinking about lately is creating a joyful, comfortable classroom environment, especially one in which science, math, and literacy can be found in all corners, nooks, and crannies. I love going into other teacher's classroom to see what physical space they've created for their kiddos.

This week I'm going to try to post a picture every day of some part of the physical space in my classroom that brings a sense of joy and excitement for learning to our community. Perhaps others would be interested in doing the same? I'd love to get ideas from others.

In January I attached a bird feeder with rubber suction cups on the window that faces into the courtyard of our school. I put out a couple of field guides on birds on our science table. The kids were thrilled to look through the books and tell stories about their own bird sightings during morning meeting. We waited anxiously everyday to see birds. But no feathered visitors arrived.

One day when I had written the feeder off, I was sitting at a table, working on some problem-solving with three struggling students. My back was to the window, but all of a sudden a student I was working with gasped with joy and said "¡Un pájaro!" [A bird!]. All math stopped in the class and we all watched a very ordinary little brown finch perch on our feeder for a snack.

Since then birds have been back every day. Often our mini-lessons, quiet reading time and scientist meetings are interupted by "¡Mira! ¡Un pájaro!" It's hard to be annoyed, even if we are in the middle of something else important. Most times I just say "Bird Break!", we all look for a moment and get back to work.

I hope they're learning that some of the most important and joyful parts of life and learning are unexpected, sometimes interupting what we had previously thought was the most important use of our time.

If anyone is interested in purchasing a feeder for their classroom, I highly recommend Wild Birds Unlimited. When I told the shop owner I was buying the feeder and feed for my classroom he gave me great advice, a discount, and 40 free little magazines about birds for kids. Great place!

A thought

Hello internet! It's been a long time since I've written. Part of the reason is that I've not been feeling like the best teacher for a while now. Like many other teachers I know, I feel like I've been walking around like a stressed, over-worked, impatient blob of a person. Thanks to some great advice from my friends, colleagues, husband, therapist, Starbucks employee, stranger on the corner, I've come up with some new ways of looking at my teaching world that I'm going to be trying.

1) Focusing on a couple of things that I love teaching. For me right now it's working on getting into some rich problem solving in math and working on a mapping project of our school courtyard that we'll be using for tracking various changed occurring in our world (sunrise/sunset, temperature, seasons, movement of Sunny the turtle). Much to my personal dismay I can't be perfect (or even great) in all moments. I need to let go of this quest and focus on what my kids and I are passionate about. The other parts of the day will sort themselves out.

2) Be present to the moment. I often find that the more I've planned and slaved away over exactly how I'll teach something, the less successful I am at teaching it. Last night I left my backpack full of work and my laptop in my car (My friend Katie calls this the "guilt bag"!) and didn't even let myself bring that world into my home. I went to bed at 7:30pm last night, and today, as a result, was one of my most peaceful, responsive days in a long time. Sometimes planning less allows me to listen more in the class, accept the kids for who and where they are in life and their learning, and enjoy the process with them.

Today I looked around during our map-making session and saw kids measuring, constructing, writing looking out the window to compare our map to the courtyard. It was a great moment for our community and our learning. And I was fully there to enjoy it--all without even cracking the bag of assessments, plans, professional books, and emails last night. Amazing!

What Keeps Teachers Going

One of my favorite teachers, although I've never met her, is Mary Cowhey. If Mary (I feel like I'm a first name basis with her!) writes it, I will read it.

She is the author of Black Ants and Buddhists: Thinking Critically and Teaching Differently in the Primary Grades. She's also written parts of several books written or edited by Sonia Nieto including What Keeps Teachers Going and Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare to Teach.

I have been re-reading What Keeps Teachers Going this weekend, as I have been wondering that question for the past month or so. I find that October is a hard month for me in the cycle of teaching. The days are getting shorter, summer is a distant memory. We (teachers and students) have settled in to do the hard, amazing, intense, joyful, work of the year. Long, long days are spent at school, and days are even longer when we bring home work after those days.

In October there are wonderful days when children make connections between what happens in our classroom and their lives (isn't that what it's all about?), when our classroom is compassionate, when someone has a new idea that leads us into an investigation totally unplanned. In October there are hard days when I think it seems like there was more conflict and frustration than anything else.

In What Keeps Teachers Going, Mary Cowhey writes that "teaching is a way to live the world." I feel that. Most of the time, it is a wonderful feeling. Teaching has changed how I see the world. It has changed what I know about the world (the magnificent golden trim of monarch chrysalis, how to start a worm club, how to love an angry child, how wheat grows, how expensive lice medicine is) Teaching has changed how I act in the world (I am a better listener, I know the importance of anger, I am learning how to be more flexible and how to live more in the moment).

Nevertheless, I wonder how people continue teaching for their whole careers. I wonder if I will be one of those people (Heck, in October, I wonder if I will survive this year with my sanity intact). One of my favorite quotes is by Andre Gide who said, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." This quote sounds reassuring in September when one is setting out on a journey, watching the shore fade into the past. Now that, in October, we're in the thick of things, I'm not so sure. I wonder if I have enough if myself, my soul, to give to teaching or if I have already given too much.

Science word walls

We try to make a word wall for all of our important science themes. Here is our moveable word wall for the layers of soil.

We love soil!

I never thought I'd be fascinated by soil! We've been busy in my class studying how soil affects life--the life of the plants that grow in it, and the life of the animals that eat those plants. During our study of monarch butterflies, we learned about milkweed as a host plant for this kind of butterfly. We wondered what other plants were host plants for other kinds of butterflies. Well, as it turns out dill and parsley are host plants for the black swallowtail butterfly.

Today we applied what we've learned about soil (its layers and components) to set up our experiment to see what kind of soil is best for growing parsley and dill.

We planted dill and parsley seeds in various mixes of soil including potting soil, a 50-50 mix of potting soiling and humus, a 50-50 mix of potting soil and sand, a 50-50 mix of potting soil and clay, and a 50-50 mix of potting soil and silt.

Tomorrow we will make hypotheses in our scientists' journals about which soil mix will support the seeds' growth. We're hoping we can keep our herbs alive long enough to transplant outside and hopefully attract some black swallowtail butterflies to our school grounds! Stay tuned!

Las mariposas monarcas

Today was a joyful day of teaching. This year, we dove into science by studying monarch butterflies and participating in a Journey North project. We raised the caterpillars, watching them chomp down on milkweed leaves, carefully observed them as they hung in the "j" shape and turned into chrysalises, and waited until they emerged as butterflies. Today we took 13 of our butterflies to the courtyard and released them, watching them soar into the sky. But not before tagging them with special stickers made by Monarch Watch. If our butterflies are found along the way on their migration journeys, these stickers list a phone number and website where people can report their sightings. My students are thrilled by the idea that someone out there might find our butterflies, and that we might get to find out where they went. They are passionate scientists! Next up for us, we'll be digging into our soil studies and studying the connection between monarch butterflies, the plants the need, and the soil near our school.