Thursday

Hello,

Sorry about no blog yesterday.  I was on a bus going to a funeral up to Bar Harbor and while my assumption that the bus would have wifi was correct, the signal was so weak I couldn't get my blog page to come up.

Here's the daily rundown: We worked on multiples in math.  Students colored in multiples on hundreds charts to notice patterns.  Most students need to finish this work at home.

We learned more factual information about Columbus from a picture book by Demi.  Late in the day we got a Taino perspective from Jane Yolen's book Encounter.  The Taino were the tribes people that Columbus and his crew first encountered.  Jane Yolen speculates what they might have thought and writes a book through the eyes of a Taino boy.

We finished the day separating the class into four tribes.  Each tribe was given a strange language of gestures, a goal, and some pattern blocks which represented different things to each tribe.  Some tribes had goals to make friends.  Some tribes had goals to try to find servants.  I let them loose, no oral language allowed.  There was lots of frustration.  No tribe could understand what the others were saying or why they wanted them to do what they were trying to get them to do.

In the end, the tribes with friendly goals went along much more willingly with other tribes' requests. The tribes with sordid goals, refused to cooperate with any other requests, including the ones from the friendlies. I hoped to give the kids a glimpse into the difficulties of those first meetings and I also wanted to give them a sense of the plethora of false assumptions that were made.  In our case, most behaviors and assumptions were based on a simple goal that I gave each group.  In each case, they made assumptions that all tribes had similar goals.  Ask your child what silly things they were doing in their tribe, but also ask to see what they got out of it.

Book orders go in this Sunday.

Have a good night.

Mr. Shea