POCIS conference at TBS on Saturday!

The POCIS Northern California annual Lower School Conference will be held at TBS this Saturday! Titled Building Blocks: Creating Community and Connecting Our Identity, participants will engage in interactive workshops and explore identity. Facilitators will utilize case studies, data, and personal narratives to construct restorative justice action plans. Workshops for adults and students alike! Interested? You can register here.

What Do Oceanography and Empathy Have In Common?

Our K-8 assemblies really have been phenominal this year, and today's edition continued with that excellence. What made it so special was both the quality of the student sharing -- powerful and important subjects of both environmental and social justice were discussed -- as well as the deeply respectful listening that the audience showed throughout the event!

After a welcome from Mitch, Strawberry Creek (4th/5th grade) presented a two-part showcase of learning. The first segment drew on their recent unit on oceanography and marine biology to explain what happens when garbage winds up in the ocean (i.e. the Pacific Trash Patch) through a skit, direct conversation, and a movie the students made (I'll try to update this post with the video!).

The second portion of their presentation was a panel discussion on the perjorative use of the phrase "That's so gay." Students shared the history of the word gay, how it came be used as a slur, and the importance of THINKing before speaking.

Student Life Coordinator Kate Klaire then made an announcement about the upcoming No Name Calling Week curriculum block, which began today in K-5 and will continue for the next four weeks.

The Middle School continued the assembly with a wonderful presentation on the service learning projects they implemented the day before Winter Break. Below are just a few of the pictures from the slideshow, with the text of their presentations embedded along the way.

The day before Winter Break was the first of four Advisory Service Days in the 7th and 8th grade.  There are four very different organizations that we are partnering with this year and every advisory will have the opportunity to volunteer at each of them.  The idea is that we get a chance to try out different kinds of service, and experience helping all different kinds of people in different ways, so that we can figure out for ourselves how we might like to serve in the future.   It was a great way to spend the day before the holidays.

Norman’s advisory went to the mouth of School House Creek where it empties into the Bay along the Bay Trail.  The Middle School has officially adopted this part of the shoreline.   Our intention in going was to clean up the beach and record data about what we collected.  We picked up trash and sorted it depending on what it was.  The reason they record the data is to try and get an idea of where the trash is coming from so they can maybe do something about it.  For example Shorebird Nature Center helped to get plastic bags banned in Berkeley by using this kind of data.  We found 556 pieces of plastic plus tons more identifiable items.  We liked seeing all of the different things that washed up on shore because so much more than you think ends up in the Bay.   It made us all think about how if we keep on using so much plastic, how much there will be in the environment when we have children.

Craig’s advisory went to TBS’s Early Childhood Center.  We went to help the teachers make the kids feel happy, so the kids will know what it feels like to spend time with older kids and so that we get experience spending time with younger kids.  We traced continents for their map work, painted with them, read to them, did magic tricks for them and helped them build with blocks.  We liked how well behaved the kids were and noticed what great imaginations they have.  It was fun to play in that way again.   For some of us it was cool to see our old ECC teachers.

Kim’s advisory went to St. Paul’s Towers in Oakland, near Lake Merritt.  It is a senior facility that has different levels of care for elderly people.  Before we went we talked to a geriatrician and she told us about different things they do there, the levels of care, and some of the challenges we might face in talking to them.   We went to bond with the elders and help to make their holidays happy.  We brought instruments and prepared some songs to sing.  They have always wanted us to sing for them and it was cool that they sang along. We also decorated cookies with them which we liked because it was an easy way to bond with them.  Some of them have dementia or can’t hear very well so sometimes its hard to talk to them.  It wasn’t an easy experience, but it was valuable to connect with a different generation.  We got to learn about what their lives were like.  It is good to have another perspective on things that is not your own.

 

Tanya’s advisory went to Glide Memorial Church to serve lunch.  Glide’s goal is to alleviate suffering and break the cycle of poverty for people.   One of the ways they do that is through their meals program.   We took BART there and spent the day serving  600 people hot lunch.  The majority of the people that came through were elderly.  Some of them didn’t look homeless but down on their luck and in need of a good meal.  We always have our meals and our wonderful lunch program and so many take that granted.   Downtown San Francisco is right next to the Tenderloin and the fact that Glide is able to be right on that border and reach so many people is amazing.

The assembly ended with Owen (our K-8 music teacher) leading the school in The Empathy Song, by local hero Brett Dennan.

Today's K-8 Assembly: drama, leadership, science, poetry, and music!

Today's K-8 assembly was incredibly fun! After Mitch welcomed the students, the program began with a skit presented by the 7th grade students focusing on the ideas of inclusion/exclusion, cooperation, and comfort talking about these difficult topics. Check out the script written by Norman Johnson, TBS's very own Middle School Drama Teacher!

This was followed by a pitch from last year's Student Council members about the exciting experience of being on the council, and setting the stage for the selection/election process that will take place in classrooms during the next two weeks.

At each assembly, one or more classrooms presents a Showcase of Learning, in which they talk about recent classroom experiences and academic ideas they have been learning and thinking. Today's SoL featured students from Wildcat Creek (6th grade), sharing information from their Science curriculum about the composition of the Earth, and also reading original poems they've written in the style of Billy Collins' work "On Turning 10".  

The last piece of the assembly was a body-percussion experience led by Owen Roberts, TBS K-8 Music Teacher. He taught first a simple two-beat clap rhythm; then a second, four-beat snapping rhythm; and then a third, eight-beat body drumming rhythm. He split the room into groups and layered all three rhythms together, and then introduced a call-and-response element using just the chorus of "Hello Bonjour" by local artist Michael Franti and Spearhead.

Today's K-5 division meeting

In the spirit of making learning visible, here's the agenda from today's K-5 Division Meeting, interspersed with some details of what was discussed or done during that segment of the meeting. 

1. Review ground rules (5 min)

Proposed Ground Rules for K-5:

Start & end on time

Be present and engaged

Maintain a sense of humor

Assume good will

2. Celebrating successes (5 min)

-BTSN

-K-3 configuration work

-Master schedule revision

-Sharing from the group

3. Professional Development report (20 min)

Jeff: Using the Think-Puzzle-Explore Thinking Routine from Project Zero, with The Railway by Edouard Manet as the provocation.

4. Meaningful Faculty Evaluation process (10 min)

- this is a means to an end, which is a strong and aligned culture

- Page.2B has professional expectations

- Complete p.1-5 so we can meet to finalize your PD plan for the year.

5. Sharing craft knowledge (5 min)

Daniel: tool for sequencing monthly mini-lessons

6. Site expectations (10 min)

At The Berkeley School, all spaces will…

o   make learning visible

o   demonstrate intentionality

o   demonstrate care for the environment and materials

Activity: Break into groups and create Y-Charts (see below for the posters faculty generated)

7. Calendaring (2 min)

Protocol for setting up field trips

Getting level-based program events on the proper Google calendars

8. Math differentiation (10 min)

Sima and Renee: their roles and resources

Classroom charts and print

Observing in the classrooms today, I was struck by the amount of text and language already appearing throughout the school. From student work to new vocabulary, and from activity instructions to the scribing of children's ideas, the classrooms are already bursting with the language of thinking and learning!

A Goat Rodeo of Our Own

With permission, I'm reposting an email that Head of School Mitch Bostian sent out to the faculty yesterday.

Happy Thursday!

Last Saturday night, I was lucky enough to see "Goat Rodeo" perform at the Greek Theater.  

Goat Rodeo is a string quartet that's atypical for three reasons:  it features a mandolin instead of a second violin, it includes a vocalist, and each performer is a well-known and successful solo performer.  The history of collaborative efforts (music, acting, athletics, restaurants) is littered with groups like this:  they've looked good on paper but have failed to succeed in practice.  

In contrast, Goat Rodeo is clearly succeeding.  The passion and enthusiasm with which they collaborate are consistently visible, and they're achieving both critical success and popular acclaim.  They're breaking down some genre walls in the process, too.  Whether they know it or not :), they're a great example of how working together to ignite minds and awaken hearts can equip artists AND audiences to engage a changing world.

If you have 9 minutes today or this weekend, please take a look at this video for some inspiration.  It begins with the group talking about their creative process for one particular song, "Attaboy" -- in a way that's genuine, funny, and taps into a real truth about passion and "work."  At the 3:37 mark, the group plays an encore, "All Through The Night," which is one of the most beautiful renditions of that traditional song that I've ever heard.  

As an organization, we're ready to make this kind of music together in 2013-2014.

Take care,

Mitch

Practical Life in action

At the end of next week, Sweet Briar Creek (2/3) and Temescal Creek (2/3) classrooms will hold their annual Family Tea events. A huge amount of effort and preparation goes into putting on these lovely celebrations of family and community, one small strand of which is simply preparing the invitations to family members. This is a great opportunity to learn about -- and put into action in a project of relevancy to students' real life -- the different parts of letter writing, and there is so much to learn:  the location of the date, drafting and finalizing text, creating the salutation and closing, preparing the visual presentation, figuring out how to folder the paper to get it into the envelope and how to arrange the letter, RSVP card, and any other elements in the envelope, and getting the address accurate and using proper postage.

A template for the letter provided by teachers

A pair of draft letters

An ornately decorated final copy of a letter

Folding a letter to fit in an envelope take practice

Finished letters await their stamps

A Day in the Life....of 4th Grade Math

This morning I had the pleasure of observing a fourth grade math class. Though we have two mixed 4th/5th classrooms, every morning the students regroup by grade for math, and this year Jeff and Kellyne are teaching 4th grade math.

The class began with the teachers taking the students to the basketball court, and organizing them into two groups to play a 10-minute long math version of Giants, Elves and Wizards. One group was Even and the other was Odd; the teachers would shout a computation problem (such as 4x3), and the group with the appropriate characteristic to the answer (in this case Even) would then chase the other group to a safety line, attempting to tag as many people as they could (tagged students then had to switch sides and become part of the other group). This 10 minute warm up combined mental calculations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and knowledge of odd and even, with a kinesthetic action (chasing or fleeing) that motivated students to attempt to speed up their computational speed.

Everyone then moved inside to the rug, where they found their notebooks and pencils, and worked on a series of warm-up problems displayed on the interactive whiteboard. The students had 10 minutes to work on their own, and then 10 minutes of whole-group sharing and discussion about the problem set, which included logic problems (Two men play five games of chess, and each wins an equal amount as the other. How is this possible?), greater/less than symbol application (155 > 99), and connected pairs of algebraic problems involving addition or subtraction with one variable (If 27 - X = 20, what is X? Next, what is X + 14?)

The class then continued a stations-based work period begun earlier in the week, for about 30 minutes. One station drew on Marcy Cook curriculum for creating dynamic triple-digit addition equations involving regrouping. Two stations drew on JUMP! Math curriculum for investigations into linear measurement and time telling. One station drew on Everyday Math curriculum for work with pan balancing (solving equations using various weights on either side of a balance scale); and the last station contained cuisenaire rods for students to use in working with the Show Me 1/2 fractions curriculum. In the last five minutes of class, students returned to the rug to preview the homework assignment, ask clarifying questions, and organize their materials.

There were many aspects of this period that artfully embodied the elementary division's approach to instruction. The introductory activity (on the basketball court) combined the use of prior knowledge with current skill development, while providing movement-based reinforcement using a high-motivation game format. The second phase of the class (on the rug) provided guided practice on current concepts and whole-group sharing of strategies for arriving at answers, balancing individual students' desires to work alone (some students wore noise-canceling headphones to help them concentrate) or in groups (some students engaged in spirited conversation while attempting to solve the problems). The third phase of class (five table workstations) allowed for student-directed choice about which concept and activity to practice, and also gathered students together to support their understanding of how the homework connected with the work they had been doing. Taken as a whole, the tripartite structure of the lesson provided adequate time in each phase for students to dive into the knowledge and skills presented, while factoring in student motivation and the constraints of their ability to maintain attention.

Friday Morning Fun

I love Friday mornings at The Berkeley School. Each K-5 grade level has a unique tradition that engages students in their intellectual learning linked to important social learning as well. In the K/1 classrooms,  parents and family members are invited in for Free Friday, a chance to explore materials, collaborate on reading, writing, and math activities, play games and puzzles, and put the child in the role of expert and guide to demonstrate (and thereby consolidate) his/her learning.  

In the 2/3 classrooms, parents and family members join students during a Reader's Workshop period. Children without family members present often spontaneously gather together in groups and simultaneously read and share a variety of (often non-fiction) texts.

Friday mornings at the 4/5 level usually begin with a "Cerritoberry" period, in which all students and teachers from both classrooms come together to do an activity (or play a game) that promotes communication and collaboration. For today's activity, students were broken up into groups of 5 or 6 and given the following survival situation (drawn from secondary Scouting curriculum, which uses it for the purposes of teaching content, whereas for TBS it was used for teaching critical thinking, communication, and collaboration):

You and your companions have just survived the crash of a small plane.  Both the pilot and co-pilot were killed in the crash.  It is mid-January , and you are in Northern Canada.  The daily temperature is 25 below zero, and the night time temperature is 40 below zero.  There is snow on the ground, and the countryside is wooded with several creeks criss-crossing the area. The nearest town is 20 miles away. You are all dressed in city clothes appropriate for a business meeting. Given a group of items you’ve recovered from the wreck (a small ax, a can of Crisco, newspapers, a lighter, etc), create a list of the items in order of importance for your survival, followed by the uses of each item and the reason why you have it in the order you’ve chosen.

Scenes and schedules from the First Day of School

Students lining up outside Strawberry Creek.... 

...and Laurel Creek...

...and Blackberry Creek!

The schedule for the day in Blackberry Creek....

....and students in action completing the Lost Tooth Chart.

The schedule for the day in Cerrito Creek.

The schedule for the day in Sweet Briar Creek.... 

...and students in action with gak during Super Science!

The schedule for the day in Temescal Creek...

...and students in action practicing the goodbye routine.

Students in Laurel Creek prepare to sing a song about the vowels.

The schedule for the day in Strawberry Creek...

...and students in action doing a generative writing exercise during Writing Workshop.