Hope you are having a great weekend. Please
remember to register for the P.E.T. Workshop this Tuesday. The facilitator, Meike, is highly recommended by our pal Jennifer Lehr. We are organizing child care (details below) this time! Also,
please review the Admin section for information about our upcoming work day.
Language topics
This week we continued working on how to take the perspective of other people by using drama as a way to think deeply about the experience of people involved in the integration of schools in the 60s. We played a game called “Hot seat” in which each person got the opportunity to take the stage using an old TV screen shell as the prop while audience members asked the person questions about themselves. Students got to think beyond what they might feel and think and imagine how another person with a different perspective might feel.
A wonderful result of this theatrical experience was the shared language of “changing the channel.” This came about because the experience went from serious, to comedic, and then had trouble moving back into historical. We decided that we needed a break from the “history Channel” in order to spend a few moments exploring the “Comedy” channel. We activated our remotes, toggling between two modes of being. We will continue this type of game as it lays the foundation for our brains to be able to switch between the multiple ways of being that are available in our multi-dimensional learning environment. Fun is fabulous, and so is serious. At home, ponder with your child the questions: How do we help our brains make the switch from humor to serious or vise versa in order to further our learning?
Math
Connecting with our work on taking perspective we continued focusing on our spatial ability and intelligence. “Spatial ability is a category of reasoning skills that refers to the capacity to think about objects in three dimensions and to draw conclusions about those objects from limited information. A person who has an easy time picturing the world from an observer’s viewpoint — who perhaps even does it often without thinking — will likely have higher spatial intelligence than someone who finds it difficult to think about life this way.”
We worked on this intelligence by adding a new game, Fits, to our repertoire of spatial intelligence games that include Color Code and Swish. This new game has 4 levels of challenge that will prime our minds to think about the properties and adaptability of objects, concepts and perspectives. At home, explore what it means to flip and rotate objects by packing a box or the trunk (!) in the most efficient way possible.
Multi-Cultural Studies
The students had an opportunity to explore good luck traditions for the year of the horse with Alice by experiencing Chinese calligraphy. With a progression of tracing to free hand, students used authentic Chinese calligraphy brushes to work on control and spatial processing. Their ability to stick with the challenge offered them the opportunity to feel the accomplishment of moving from simple to complex characters. We look forward to more! At home: a connection to the art of Chinese calligraphy is the long lost art of cursive writing from our schooling past. Share your favorite cursive letter and practice the strokes, thinking about how we hold our writing utensil gently and poetically.
Emerging interests
The class pet project continues as we figure out how to use PowerPoint to put together a proposal for making this interest a reality. Rainbow looming is also a hot topic as students are creating the longest strands that they can, potentially as long as the school, or at least longer than their dad! At home, measure each family member and determine the equivalency of inches and feet.
Social Emotional
We continue to explore the question: What do you do when something you are working on gets really challenging? We experienced this while doing math as well as in a group problem solving moment where everyone wanted a private space to read behind the curtain. The solutions that have emerged: keep going no matter what, give up, take a break to recharge and then come back to try again. We will continue to explore this crossroads each of us encounter when faced with challenge and how to build our muscle of resiliency as well as self-care. At home, share stories with your child of how you have dealt with challenge.
High School (say what?!)
Have you thought about which schools (or other education approach) may be an option for your child/children after age 14? TKG is thinking about it!
We want all TKG sprouts to have the foundation of knowledge they need to transition to their next school so, we are organizing a committee to start gathering our parent community’s thoughts and plans about “high school” and we are looking for people to join us. Future action steps will include meeting with representatives from the ‘schools of interest’ to provide an introduction to our school and doing some in-depth information gathering about each school’s admissions requirements.
Our initial meeting will be Saturday March 8th right after the Student Visit ‘mock classroom day’. Allow for 30 minutes to review the concept and schedule our first official meeting (approx 3-4 weeks following initial meeting)
Please let Monica know that you will attend.
Have a great weekend and remember, this Friday is Field Trip Day! We will be exploring our class wondering: “What is the perfect city?”