(Lynda Barry, Down the Street, Harpercollins, 1988)

“Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person.  Generally it’s in the fall, when you re-enter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation.  That’s when you register the change most sharply.”

– Alice Munro, “Child’s Play”

I, for one, can attest to the fact that leaving behind “the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation” is a task not strictly confined to the young.  In many ways, coming back was like slipping back into a comfortable and familiar sweater; in others, it was like hitting a brick wall.  And in the mysterious ways of Time, 8.16 repeating days in it almost feels like this new group has been inhabiting Portable 2 forever (surrounded by and occasionally bumping into the spirits of our friends from Grade 7 last…).

Truth: it is I who is really the stranger here, as most of you already had the 2015/16 school year together, as the original (1.0) Suncrest MACC 4/5 class; but as discussed, so much has happened in the year prior to this reunion that you really are meeting again as new people, with the opportunity to create a palimpsest of those past experiences and the freedom to take what worked and slough off what didn’t, to rewrite the script of past relationships and ways of being with the pens of your new selves.

To that end, we have been engaging in a lot of work to re-get-to-know each other, to welcome the two new friends that have joined us from Armstrong and Cap Hill, and to create a space where each and every one of us feels safe and celebrated for being our true selves.

People Search!

 

(Here’s the document we used for the People Search: First Day People Search 2017_18)

Crazy 8s!  With ever-expanding rules!  In random groups!

(Including special guest, Lori Driussi, who put the “pal” in principal by joining us for an entire morning session, and arrived with her own Elvis deck – things got serious when she announced that she had been practicing the night before… And, proving that principals are people, too, Ms. Driussi had to be gently chastized for continuing to talk after the lights were flickered on and off – one of our signals to bring the room to focus.)

Discussed our Hopes and Fears for the year!

 

Increased our capacity for team work by throwing balls at each other under the strange sunless sky!

 

Played King Pong!

(One of my favorites, due in part to the titular “Human chain!” aspect that last years’ class invented, whereby teams can rescue balls from no-persons-land by forming unbroken human chains; in the rush of competition, people who seldom interact are suddenly grasping ankles and hands and working together for the common good.  Cue laughter. Thank you to the incredible Mrs. Vennels of SD44 for introducing me to this game.)

Worked in randomly assigned groups to discuss when and why school becomes hard, pre-thought strategies for dealing with feeling overwhelmed, and reminded ourselves of the good feelings that are generated when we finish something that was hard!

(Advanced warning: in the coming weeks, we will explore why the response, “Not my problem” – which appeared in various forms more than one, two, or ten times –  to the question, “What can you do when you see someone else is overwhelmed or stuck,” is detrimental not only to the person who is struggling but also to you, and to our class and school as a whole.)

Learned the concept behind the Wing Chun form of martial arts from a fictional version of Shaolin abbess Wu Mei and applied that thinking to our school work!

 

Applied aspects of the Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies curriculum to making name plates for our desks!

 

(The criteria sheet for our Name Plate project can be found here – and also under “Projects,” “Subjects,” “Art” on the main navigation bar on this blog page: Name Plate Art Criteria)

 

Meanwhile, we:

Watched a video about lunch at an elementary school in Japan!

And brainstormed how we could incorporate some of the Big Ideas expressed in the video into our own classroom!

And we:

Simultaneously worked on throwing and catching, strategic thinking, and team spirit with Long Ball (thank you to my Obi Wan Kenobi, Mr. Grundy, at Parkcrest!)!

 

Had our first Dictionary War!  (So intense!)

Continued to hone our group work skills (are you sensing a theme, yet?) in the Survival Simulation Challenge!

In this work, students were assigned into groups using the Random Deck of Terror®, and then each student was given a specific role within the group (thank you to the divine Mrs. Pitt, principal of Morley, for this and so many other student-centric ideas).

Groups worked within a set time limit to rank the survival items in order of importance, with special emphasis placed coming up with creative uses of each item.

 

Groups submitted their choices…

And we found out how they fared against the expert knowledge of Mark Wanvig, a former instructor in survival training for the Reconnaissance School of the 101st Division of the U.S. Army:

“Steel wool?!?!”

(MACC-sters, can you spot my – what is it? I’ve lost count – 17th mistake, in the photo above?)

The team with the least numerical difference between their ranking and Wanvig’s ranking won, which also gave us a chance to practice celebrating wins and losses equally:

“Gecko’s, you won!”

“Yay!”

“Everyone else, you lost!”

“Yay!!!”

And finally, students privately assessed the people in their group, including themselves, in regards to how each functioned as a group member: Group Work Assessment Form

Concurrently, we:

Started/restarted the practice of Morning Index Cards, to help us all begin the day from the same place, and to practice drawing without judgement!

(Our focus last week – which included self-as-spy and You at Your Best – was on personal identity, part of our big work together this year.)

Humored my tennis obsession by watching some highlights from the US Open and reading commentary in various news sources and tried to distill what we viewed and read into something applicable to the classroom!

From Venus Williams, Petra Kvitova, and Sloane Stephens, we learned perservernce.

Here are your definitions:

My favorite quote of the Open was from a commentator who, after Nadal‘s semi-final match against previous champion Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina, said, “The match was over after Nadal lost the first set,” meaning that Rafa had used the first set to carefully learn about del Potro’s game and form, and was willing to sacrifice the set to do so, before applying what he had learned to a relentless clamp-down of a win.

In addition to perseverance and studious patience, there was also a lot of rich discussion about good footwork as a metaphor for, well, everything, and we learned a lot from Sloane Stephens’s amazing show of good sportspersonship.

After that we:

Found out about the overarching question that will govern a lot of our work this year!  And decided which terms would need to be clearly defined before we could begin to explore the question!

(Psst: project outline for our first mini-research project on Wales in the Middle Ages can be found under the “Socials” tab in “Projects – Subjects” on the navigation bar.)

Began our work understanding the concept of Depth and Complexity, using the icons developed by Bette Gould and Sandra Kaplan!

First, we practiced as a class, applying the icons to our own classroom.

Then, in randomly assigned pairs, students took a walk around the school and worked together to apply one of the icons to Suncrest, and then pooled their findings with the rest of the class. 

Next, students worked individually, applying the icons to their own homes.

And finally, we explored Brené Brown‘s incredible Ted Talk about “The Power of Vulnerability,” viewing it through the lens of Depth and Complexity.

 

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of everything we did during those first almost-two weeks (although is has been kind of exhausting to type it all up and resize all those photos… and I imagine is has been fairly exhausting to read and view all this, too!  Trust me, I’ll run out of steam in a few weeks, so soak it up while you can).  There have been so many other conversations and explorations and games and sharing of knowledge and many, many days of math diagnostics – and, of course, a lot of before, during, and after school 4-Square, 5-Rectangle, and Giant 6-Square.  It’s been heartening to watch how quickly you all have come around to things like strategic thinking in PE games and how naturally good sportspersonship seems to be coming to us as a group – and it is wonderful to see so many hands in the air, eager to share opinions and ideas, and, as always, it is humbling to bear witness to the nuance and idiosyncrasies of your creative processes.

And so, newly (re)formed Division 2,  unlike Arna and her cousin Marlys, I promise you will never be subjected to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” on the accordion, and trust me, I will never throw chalk.  However, I make no guarantees about not making you pretend to be angry trees in front of the library windows… 

Stay tuned…

So, cut to about 5000 years ago, when we started reading Madeleine L’Engle’s sci-fi masterpiece, A Wrinkle in Time.

I have been wanting to post something about that experience for many months but was deterred first by the insanity of Term 3, then by summer school, and finally by brain death.  But I cannot bear to have scanned all of those index cards for nothing, so here we go…

Our work started where they say it never should: we judged the book by its cover, and made some predictions.

(ps: someone needs to start writing that “People are battling the chicken monster” book, stat…)

Then, we proceeded to read the book aloud, at first, just me, to (hopefully) model proper vocal technique, but then, as we got a couple of chapters in, students volunteered to take on the characters’ voices, and I retreated into the narrative background.  In order to prevent a class of voracious readers from reading the entire book in one evening and thus miss out on the collective experience, I snatched the book out of their eager little hands after the end of each chapter, and our actors, as if working with Woody Allen, were only given the chapter they were reading, so that they could look up unknown words and concepts and practice their parts.  Our focus here was in reading as if in a radio play: how do you convey the motivation and subtext of the character just with your voice?  

On the days of readings, our index card drawings were focused on the previous chapter, in order to re-awaken the story in our heads and to practice identifying key images:

Students had from the second bell to the end of the Listening Program to complete their impromptu drawings; so, depending on when they arrived in class, anywhere from about five minutes to five seconds.

Here are the results (these cards have sat on my home desk for so long that they had the opportunity to be subjected to a coffee spill – sorry for the random stains from about chapter 6 on; Daniel, I think you will agree that this is a waste of perfectly good coffee…):

Chapter One

 

Chapter Two

 

Chapter 3

 

Chapter 4

 

Chapter 5

 

Chapter 6

 

Chapter 7

 

Chapter 8 – now, either we missed a day, or we combined Chapters 8 and 9, or I have somehow misplaced a set of index cards – in any event, I am horrified to say that there is no Chapter 8!

Chapter 9

 

Chapter 10

 

Chapter 11

 

Chapter 12

 

I love these cards so much – for the individuality they display and the snapshot they provide into each of your minds, and because the power of L’Engle’s writing is so evident in the images she created in your very non-IT brains – it will be so hard to give them back…

As we read, we also focused on a variety of other activities.

Using Depth and Complexity models as our guide…

…students worked as a class, in pairs, and finally as individuals, drawing Depth and Complexity prompts from a hat and then applying those prompts as a focus to their reading of each chapter, which gave us a lot of meat for rich class discussions.  When writing their response, the focus was on using specific evidence from the text, with proper citation, to bolster their point of view.

We found out about where Madeleine L’Engle wrote…

…and discussed what impact this location may have had on her writing, and explored the idea of having a personal “writing spot” that can feed inspiration, concentration, and creativity.

We also dug into the nature of the tesseract, or hypercube…

…first by trying to make our own…

 

…and then with the guidance of the words-cannot-properly-describe-him Carl Sagan (thanks for finding the video, Peiyan – we miss you!):

Finally, having completed the book, we began the great work: creating a 3D whole class mural of the novel.

Students were divided into six groups, based on their interest in locations and/or concepts explored in the book.  The task was to create a visual representation of this location or concept, using a variety of materials, based on the physical and atmospheric descriptions provided in the text.  

The project outline for this work can be found here: a-wrinkle-in-time-mural-criteria

In each group, students were each given a specific job – Chairperson (responsible for making sure the task was completed on time, and for making sure everyone in the group had a voice and contributed to decision-making); Diplomat (responsible for problem-solving in the event of conflict); Materials Manager (responsible for art supply runs and for making sure all group members took part in the clean-up process); and Encourager (responsible for making everyone felt good about her or his contributions).  Thanks to help from Mrs. Pitt, the incredible principal of Morley Elementary, these jobs came with helpful language prompts, to help students practice these essential roles.

It was a very messy, very engaging, and very time-intensive task:

 

The Happy Medium’s Planet, the 2D Planet, and the Tesseract:

 

The Black Thing, a Dark Planet, and the Death of Mrs. Whatsit (when she was a star):

 

Camazotz:

 

Along the way we had plenty of rich conversations and great ethical debates: Can boys and girls be friends?  When does conformity harm and when does it help?  When do our strengths and our gifts become our weaknesses, and when can our perceived faults help save the day?  How do you describe images to beings with no sight?  How do you get blue paint out of a dark carpet after it has been walked through and left to dry?

But mostly, we learned how to work together as a class to reach a desired whole, whether it was a shared understanding of a particular nuance in the writing or helping another mural group while you were waiting for an aspect of yours to dry.

I know that some students went on to read other books in the Time Quartet, which is awesome.  I myself started to re-read L’Engle’s Austin Family series this summer and am enjoying it just as much as the first and second times, and of course finding new things in it as I go along.

It may seem an odd place to begin our school year, with this look back to work we did last year, but I think/hope it may provide a reminder to our now grade 7s of how much they can accomplish when they work together, and the great joy that reading can bring to our room; and to our new grade 6s, this is the kind of cross-curricular, group-focused work you are about to embark on.

We may also have a productive conversation about priorities, perfectionism (I won’t tell you how long I spent looking for those Chapter 8 index cards, and how much it bugs me that they are not in this post…), and work/life balance, using my spending the last two days of summer break to create this post as a cautionary tale.  Was it worth it, or would my time and heart have been better spent fully focused on the US Open?  I look forward to your responses…