Readathon Week author visits

Yesterday and today saw three terrific literary-based presentations, in our run-up to tomorrow's Readathon.

 First, Olivia Hackett-Shaughnessy wove stories together for our 2/3 and 4/5 classrooms. I was lucky to catch the first session; she began with a "pourquoi" creation story from Africa featuring an unlucky rabbit, the character of which she then connected to the Brer Rabbit stories of slaves in the American south. Next came a Brothers Grimm version of Rapunzel, followed by a Chinese ghost story from the California gold rush, and the concluding, at student request, with another scary story about Coronado and the search for the Seven Cities of Gold. Students and adults alike were captivated by the way she dropped into characters, switched out into narration, and pulled even further out to ask comprehension questions and give thinking prompts. Olive also sent us this lovely note afterwards:

I always wish I had said something after I leave a performance. Never fails.
  This time it was to your students and teachers--and you.
  The measure of kindness the world around is how a community welcomes a stranger. By that measure,
you and your school are a shining example of community. Please share that with all.
  What a delightful experience.
  Sincerely, Olive

This morning, local author and illustrator Elisa Kleven stopped by to read and speak with the K/1 students. She read from her work, shared the process by which she writes stories, and answered student questions about her art. Elisa visited as part of our Readathon week run-up two years ago, and like then she stuck around to sign and write individualized inscriptions on copies of her books for students.

The Middle School was not bereft of an author visit, either: long-time TBS parent Lillian Howan (two children are graduates, and the third is in 8th grade) read two of her stories and hosted and Q&A with students as well.

Finally, many many thanks to the parent volunteers - chiefly Jean Marstens, Brigitte Durell, and Chrisy Ponte, though others helped too - for pulling off the third annual TBS Book Swap today!

Images from the K-5 classrooms

In Cerrito Creek (4/5), students brainstormed "writing territories", or topics that they might want to write about for their next piece of short fiction.

In Sweet Briar Creek (2/3), students turned their recently finished poems into holiday gifts by adding them to hand-painted canvases.

In Temescal Creek (2/3), students used a work period to paint holiday gifts...

...work on addition and geometry...

...and build models of molecules.

In Laurel Creek (K/1), students used a literacy workshop period for projects related to their study of author Jan Brett, including writing and illustrating stories...

...contributing to a class mural of events in Trouble with Trolls...

...and sewing giant mittens as in The Mitten.

Finally, in Strawberry Creek (4/5), students worked in small groups to read the Declaration of Independence and come up with laws that they felt would directly arise from that text.

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.

8th Grade Graduation

Today's graduation ceremony was a touching and powerful event. My hat goes off to the students for their insightful, articulate reflections on their experiences at TBS, expressed through song, poem, story and speech. Though the themes of change that these 13-year-olds have lived through are fairly repetitious - overcoming shyness, making new friends, accepting oneself, learning what it means to truly work hard, becoming inspired by a teacher, etc - I am always amazed at how each one is able to find a unique and original approach, if not an entirely new story,  to tell about how s/he has changed during her/his time at the school.


The centerpiece of the TBS graduation event is the student presentations, which meld exhibition as an assessment device with the entire range of school-wide learning outcomes, and especially our emphasis on meta-cognition and reflection as essential skills for effective learning. This six-week unit begins with a variety of activities that help students remember and recall information about their time at TBS, starting with the creation of a timeline of their time at TBS filled with dozens of details about each year on the line. Students then move into creating Top 10 lists on various topics about their time at the school, followed by the construction of an extended metaphor ("My time at TBS has been like a ________, because __________"). This is a very public and interactive phase of the project, where students relive their younger years and share laughter and memories, and thus begin the process of moving towards closure with their time at TBS, for which the graduation event itself is merely the formal signifier.

At this point, students are ready to move into the next, more individual phase of the project, which is thinking about their own presentations. They first are asked to select a topic in response to the prompt, "What is a major way that you changed in your time at TBS?" This is followed by my personal favorite part of the project, which is a lesson on the nature of form/content relationship; by reading and discussing the poems Swan and Shadow by John Hollander and r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r by ee cummings, students learn that the form of their presentation (speech, poem, story, song, etc) should have some connection to the content of the poem, and that the two need to work in harmony to reinforce the central meaning and message of the project. Armed with this understanding, students are able to make discerning choices about how to proceed with drafting their texts, in both form and content.

Rounds and rounds of drafting, editing and revising follow, sometimes right up until the day before graduation, which is a little nerve-racking for teachers and students alike. During this last week, lessons about the actual delivery of the project are provided through watching video of, or having read-alouds of, graduation projects from previous years. Verbal and non-verbal topics including pacing, intonation, enunciation, posture, gesture, and eye contact are analyzed and discussed, and then practiced in a variety of settings, from alone to with a partner to on a live microphone. And though most students admit to being nervous before and during their presentation, the love, laughter, insight, and presence that these young adults bring to the event create an environment of joy and renewal just at the moment that we need it most.

Scenes from today's classrooms

Blackberry Creek (K/1) & Cerrito Creek (4/5) - During buddy time, students were doing collaborative drawings; each piece of paper was divided into quadrants, and each buddy needed to contribute some drawing to each quadrant. This helps students practice skills of interdependency and creativity.

Laurel Creek (K/1) - Water Day, with a variety of water-related games such as Sponge Dodgeball and Water Balloon Toss. This was a student-selected "holiday", a tradition in our K/1 program that replaces simple birthday celebrations with activities and events that help children learn about each other's interests. 

Sweet Briar Creek (2/3) - During math workshop, students used Hundreds Boards to see the patterns created by doing "Multiples of" work, puzzled through logic problems, compared fractions using Montessori fraction tiles, and watched a Kahn Academy video showing what's actually happening during the standard algorithm for subtraction.

Temescal Creek (2/3) - During a writing workshop, students worked on taking notes for the Informational Texts they are creating. They consulted research sources and wrote their notes into graphic organizers preloaded with questions around topics including diet, interactions, lifespan, anatomy, and habitat.

Strawberry Creek (4/5) - Student worked on painting props, backdrops and staging for their end-of-year performance of understanding about California history, coming up next Wednesday.






Bonus: Video of Sweet Briar Creek practicing If I Had A Hammer

Annual TBS student art show

I hope you had the chance to come to the annual student art show Friday night, or Saturday morning. I am always so deeply impressed at the artistic thinking that Julianne and Benicia ask our students to engage in, and the ways in which student creativity enables them to create these fascinating pieces! And what a labor of love it is for the teachers to throw the show.

Moments I Witnessed Today

Laurel Creek - Students reading "just right" books during Reading Workshop.

Blackberry Creek - Students working in their Handwriting Without Tears workbooks.

Temescal Creek: A range of activities during math workshop, including tracing and then painting complicated geometric shapes based on the property of symmetry - using the Stamp Game to understand division problems - practicing multiplication facts - using snap cubes to create pattern trains for TERC work - and investigating ratios.

Sweet Briar Creek - Students choreographing on a dance to the Water Cycle Rap:

Strawberry Creek - A mixed 4/5 math class on measurement. One station asked students to select classroom objects, estimate their length or width, and then measure them. At another station, students were measuring the length and width of insects. At a third, a variety of objects not easily measurable waited on a platter to be measured. The crowning activity: how can you measure the thickness of a piece of paper?

What Makes a Great App?

I have an iPad, and I have learned to love it. When I first was given the iPad by TBS, I had many complaints - the digital keyboard chief among them - and I didn't see how it would be a useful or relevant tool in support of my work to improve student learning. It was more like a toy, with a few useful features to my work as an administrator, including the Camera app (which allows me to easily shoot video in class) and the Notepad app (which allow my notes to instantly become digital, instead of having to retype them later).

I still have many questions about the iPad's effectiveness as a teaching tool for students. There are several good apps that help develop early literacy skills for PreK-1st grade students, and there are several good apps that develop problem solving skills, such as TinkerBox (choice quote from this app's homepage: "TinkerBox is more than just educational!"). However, the majority of the "educational games" apps I have come across targeting 2nd-6th grade students seem more geared towards rote memorization; an example is Math Ninja, which is basically for practicing operations and math facts.

That's why I was extremely excited to stumble upon Toontastic this week. In this app, players build stories one scene at a time, following the classic pattern of Setup, Conflict, Challenge, Climax, and Resolution. They add in characters, settings and actions to create the narrative arc, record original narration and/or dialogue to move the story forward, and select from the type and intensity of background music to reinforce the emotional force of the plot. The program is pre-loaded with many character and background options (with more available for purchase), and a drawing program that allows students to create their own as well. It also comes with a Parent Guide, which is basically a teaching guide that includes questions to pose to children as they work on their stories.

I was intrigued enough by this app to go online and check out the website, which did not disappoint. There is a page on the site called "Learning Goals", which has perfect resonance to the idea of understanding goals in the Teaching for Understanding framework for unit creation we have learned about from Project Zero. What made me especially excited was the combination of ideas that the developers of this app are drawing upon; play, constructionism, social development, and story structure. I am excited to see developers looking for ways to leverage the iPad technology in service of learning, rather than simply trying to come up with more palatable ways for children to learn math facts than flash cards and pencil-and-paper repetition.

Do you/your child have a favorite educational app that fits our goal of providing a constructivist approach to teaching and learning? If so, please tell me about it in the comments field.