Books and such teach us so much, but there's nothing quite like the learning gleaned from the road. Lucy and family just returned from a two-week odyssey through the Southwest! Lucy kept a daily diary, recording her observations and opinions as the family road-tripped from place to place. She shared her diary with us today and fielded questions from her curious classmates.
Last week we mailed two oversized envelopes to Cleo and Theo, two Giant Pacific Octopuses who live at the Oregon Aquarium in Newport. Inside were handmade letters of love for Valentine's Day ... and the curators put our Valentines on display! Thanks to Supermom Dannon for helping craft our Valentines cards!!
In science, we have been learning about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Texas-sized pouch of plastic floating in the North Pacific Ocean. In math, we have been learning about coordinate geometry, where X-axis meets Y-axis and life becomes ordered (pairs). This afternoon science met math when we unrolled our world map, investigated the lines that ran vertically and horizontally, realized the lines on our map mirrored the four quadrants of the mathematical coordinate plane, and plotted our way to pinpoint the Garbage Patch (between 135-155 degrees West and 35-42 degrees North). This exploration happened naturally, without predetermined lesson plans or objectives ... just a group of learners asking questions, thinking, figuring stuff out, making mistakes and then backtracking to try again ... and eventually covering our map with hearts, of course! For decades Jason, the father of 2nd-grade Bela, has been studying and teaching capoeria, the Afro-Brazilian martial art. A mixture of dance, gymnastics, and music, capoeria was borne from slavery and today is considered "intangible cultural heritage" by UNESCO.
Today Jason brought capoeira into the Dome School! And we've got the photos to prove it ... (Bela and family are about to hop to Hawaii for two weeks, but when they return Jason plans to teach capoeira to the elementary class every Friday from 1:45-2:30 p.m.) “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” |