Heart Maps and Bridges to Neighborhood House

             A few weeks ago, the students were asked to create a map of what weighs heavily on their heart or what issues are they most concerned. These maps were the product of their thinking: 

   

     We then returned to the maps in order to research and learn about what services Neighborhood House provides and where we can find bridges to our own hearts. After researching, we then generated questions we could ask on our field trip. Here are some of the questions:

        Now that we have visited and learned more about Neighborhood House, we can link 3 major issues from our heart maps: Poverty, Hunger and Homelessness. Stay tuned for more learning as we dig into these issues. 

Neighborhood House Head Start

      Last week, we had our first visit to Neighborhood House. The students visited the Head Start program in small groups of 6 and spent time in the classrooms. They were given a directive to try and model and encourage students to use as much language as possible as many of the students are recent immigrants from all over the world. The 5th grade students enjoyed playing with the younger students and are excited to go back!

Wonder: Right vs. Kind

       When Given the Chance between being right and being kind, choose Kind. 

         This is the September precept from Mr. Browne, August Pullman's English teacher, in the Wonder novel study.  Students put their writing side by side with the So  parents responses to make better sense of the meaning of this precept and whether they agree with the precept. The conversation became quite philosophical. Here are some highlights:

"If you are on a bike and somebody tells you, you are going to fast, they are being right. But, then you fall off your bike and the person who told you that you were going to fast checks on you then their being kind. It's good to be both." Quinny

"It really kind of depends on what right means...like how you would define right because right could mean being truthful or it could mean being kind and lying. Then I would go with right because it's always good to tell the truth...sometimes being kind is right." Bridget

"It doesn't matter if your right or wrong. If your right just keep it to yourself. You could warn them, but if - like Quinny says - if they get hurt when they are biking too fast and they get hurt, you don't just say 'I told you so'. You say "Oh!' and you help them." Sebi

"Sometimes you might want to be right, like say in Ga Ga ball, when what they (the other person) is saying is upsetting to other people. Like say for example in Ga Ga ball when people don't get out, it may be upsetting to them when people say that they are out, but I know it's upsetting to a lot of people if [the person] still doesn't get out. In that case, I would be right, because even if I am not exactly being right to the person, I am still being kind to other people." Parker

Quite the philosophical discussion.

     

Buddies and Nature

      The Dudicorns took advantage of this fine fall day to head outside with our buddies. Inspired by the art of Andy Goldsworthy, we took a walk around campus to collect natural materials and create works of art.

       To see more of the photos, you can connect to this       link https://photos.app.goo.gl/Xi3h772C3bwyYzXK2.

Creating a Class Constitution

Please Welcome the Dudicorns...

It is true. We have chosen a class name! By a vote of 10 to 8 we have become the Dudicorns of room 27 over the Taffy Tigers. We discussed the meaning of such a close vote and whether or not this negates the vote. One person even suggested that we add in the third most popular name choice and vote again so the votes will be spread out more. Hmmm....

Can all of us live with our community name? We will continue to ponder....

The choosing of the name was just the start of our week of building a constitution. We started by doing some thinking and journaling about values and what values Mrs. Duden brought into the classroom. We had discussed values before, but this served to  deepen the student understanding of what it means to value ideas rather than things. This was the basis of the classroom values that students chose. 

Parent Values

Then we turned to the parent values that were brought in through the Parent Survey. We spent some time sorting and deciding whether these parent values were represented in the student values that were already chosen.

Below you will see the document we created from the convergence of student values and parent values. You can listen in on an amazing class discussion about Growth Mindset here.


The next step was to do some learning about why we are talking about a constitution. What is a constitution? Why was it created? It may seem backward to start with the end, but I wanted to draw students attention to the history we were going to study. Who were these people in the 1600's and 1700's ? What do we notice about their agreements? What do we notice about that time? We ventured on a Museum Walk of primary source documents to get some ideas.