Culture, culture, and more culture!

We saw two great plays this week - "Bodyology" and "The Great Mountain."

Bodyology was a one-man show performed by John Burstein as "Slim Goodbody," a character from the PBS show "The Inside Story." The show featured original songs and interesting graphics about different body parts and systems and how they work. It also focused on healthy habits (ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING EVER, NEVER) and good eating. It was interactive and a lot of fun, and covered a lot of what we have been learning or will introduce in the next few weeks. For extra added fun we got to see Sofia perform an upside down and backwards "bridge walk" and Mrs. Towne move her arms "tick tock, like a clock" when Slim asked for volunteers to show amazing things audience members could do with their bodies.

Here's a short excerpt of the show if you'd like to see some of it:
http://www.slimgoodbody.com/national_tour/

The Great Mountain, an eco-adventure story, was a more traditional play performed by the Canadian theater group "Red Sky," a company focused on world indigenous dance, theater and music performances.

In "The Great Mountain," the main character, Nuna, has inherited the ability to hear the voices of nature. In response to the cries of the Great Mountain, or "Mistak," (sp?) (the Blackfoot word for mountain), Nuna must summon the courage to climb the mountain and find the power to heal the grieving environment in order to change her world.

During the after-show discussion, Meegwun Fairbrother, who played the Grandfather/Business Man/Conductor/Fisherman/Boy/Mika Jr., told us the play was inspired by the Northern Plains story of Jumping Mouse (3 versions of this story can be found here: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/other/mouse1.html), a small mouse who knows of nothing more than his small community until he jumps high enough to see the mountains and realizes there is more to the world.

The play is an allegory of global warming, and focuses on young people’s capacity to address current pressing environmental issues, which we will dig into later in the year when we finish our science unit on animals/ecosystems and get into issues of extinction, preservation, and environmental protection.

You can find out more about the play at:
http://www.broadwaycenter.org/education/ed_great-mountain.asp

and watch a short clip at:
http://www.redskyperformance.com/the-great-mountain-family-theatre

The students absolutely loved the beauty and historic detail of the restored Pantages theater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_Center_for_the_Performing_Arts), but one of the highlights of the week was lunch at the Middle School, where 6th graders were working on their Technology projects:

 Collin is working on creating a "Minecraft" version of the old movie, "Metropolis" -- there was more than a little interest here, as you can see!

 Matthew got to show off the "hidden object" game he is developing to some interested gamers!

 What a great week! Thanks to the parents who accompanied us, and, of course, to our intrepid bus driver!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hope you all enjoyed the cards we made, and thank you all for your contributions to our healthier Valentine treat (yogurt banana splits, pictured below)!

Just another normal week at Seabury ...

Yes, it's been just another normal week for the Explorers, swimming lessons not withstanding. I realized as I was trying to decide what to feature this week that this is usually my problem - not WHAT am I going to blog about this week, but WHICH of the many neat lessons am I going to feature - there's always so much to choose from! I also realized that it might be interesting to see a whole week's worth of stuff we're doing in the classroom, as opposed to focusing on one single event. So - here is, truly, what a normal week looks like:

SCIENCE: As we learn about he sense of touch, we did an experiment about what part of the hand is the most sensitive: the palm, fingertip, wrist or back of the hand. Students took turns touching each others' hands with one or two prongs of a paper clip and recording whether the subject felt the correct number. We're still working on graphing the data and determining the overall class result.

MATH: Each day we start our math lesson by working through several problems on the Smart Board, then sharing our different strategies and solutions. Here students showed how they solved a story problem by counting on using a number line, drawing a picture to represent what happened in the problem, skip counting, and repeated addition. Sometimes we make a mistake, but we usually figure that out while we're explaining our answers, and often - ah ha! This leads to greater understanding for all! (I live for the a-ha moments!)

ART: Not left out of the curriculum here, that's for sure! This was just a quick lesson on drawing a face and how to place facial features in the correct spots by using a rectangle instead of a circle to start your drawing.

READING: We use the Junior Great Books curriculum, and here we had a short Socratic Seminar style discussion of two opposing viewpoints about the main character in the story. The students in the center read their responses to a discussion question, listened to their classmates' reactions, and then were given a chance to make a rebuttal. These conversations are always lively and EXTREMELY interesting!

WRITING: Using some story cards for inspiration, we did some creative writing -- the stories could be about anything, but had to have a beginning, middle, and end.  Some were about circuses, some were about chests full of gold, some were about magical bears. Many started with "Once upon a time," but after that they were all full of surprises!

MORE MATH: To wrap up the week, inspired by the Seahawks and Super Bowl XLVIII, (which everyone around here was pretty excited about), we did an exercise we like to call a "math adventure" about Roman Numerals. The kids were given a list of what the main letters equated to, and were asked to see what patterns they could find and to see if they could figure out how Roman numerals worked. It did not take them long to start to recognize the pattern in the groups of three letters and make the connections to addition and subtraction.

So, yes, just another week at Seabury - another GOOD week. :-)