Happy Thanksgiving!

Preparing for the feast:

We did a LOT of chopping and arranging to create these beautiful and healthy platters:

And here are the things we are thankful for:

Illuminated Paragraphs

At Seabury, we like to give students as many opportunities as possible to "publish," or present their work to a larger audience. One way we do this is to rotate classes giving presentations at our weekly assembly, or gathering. Since it was our turn to present at gathering last week, we decided to share some of what we've learned in our studies of the Middle Ages. As a class, we talked about the best way to do this, and after giving the students a few different options, they chose to write paragraphs in the style of an illuminated manuscript. The Spirits did a FANTASTIC job of presenting what they have learned to the rest of the school in clear, easy-to-hear voices, and their deep knowledge of this material was clearly evident as they answered questions from the audience. Well done, Spirits!

 

(The wrinkling was purposeful - the students wanted to make the paper look like authentic vellum.)

Atmosphere Art

We are studying meteorology, and we spent some time last week learning about the different layers of the atmosphere and what happens in each layer. Here are a few of the models we created.

Creativity Building

Here's a little exercise we like to do called "30 Circles." Given a sheet of 30 blank circles, we first filled in as many circles as we could in one minute. Later, we did it again, thinking of as many different ways we could use the circles as possible, with unlimited time to work. Here are just a few examples of the kids' ideas. I loved some of the detail in drawings made with individual circles (check out the row of pencil-drawn characters in the 5th photo, below), as well as the fact that many students automatically thought "outside the box" to make several circles into one element, like a traffic light or snowman. Some circles encompassed a complete little story (a shark fin in some waves, a sunny day), some played on the circle theme (an earth, a yin-yang, a spider web), while some just explored design and color. Neat! We'll continue to use these in many different ways in the future.