Classroom Matters

What a classroom of history lovers we have!  We have begun our lessons on the Clock of Eons and have studied both the Hadean and the Archean Eon so far.  The children were captivated by the fiery drama of the Hadean Eon and by the primordial life that appeared during the Archean in the form of simple prokaryotic cells.  Now, we begin our study of the Proterozoic Eon, when life becomes more complex, and the first plant and animal cells appear.  The children can hardly wait to explore this next eon and create their own cell models!  

In geography, we are continuing our study of the world’s biomes. The children are delving deeply into each of Earth’s eight major biomes – mountains, tropical forests, polar regions, oceans, grasslands, temperate forests, wetlands, and deserts, on each of the Earth’s continents. The children will work on research about the animals and people of each of these biomes while honing the skills of note-taking and composing original sentences from their own notes.  These are big skills that they practice with care and pride.  

Your children’s animal researches are also a source of great pride and excitement.  We are enjoying learning all about wolves, flying squirrels, otters, and snakes, to name a few.  They can’t wait to share what they’ve learned with you!   

Physical science experiments, Picturing Writing, geometry lessons, and big math problems will continue to fill our days for the weeks ahead.  We also look forward to more great sledding days, cozy read-aloud time, and long focused work times.  Please remember to send layered clothing in with your kids, as we will continue to keep our windows cracked for ventilation, even on these chilly days.  

The New Year brings several new activities for the Third Year students.  As a follow-up to their November food drive for Mutual Aid of Tompkins County, they are now initiating a campaign to collect warm weather gear to distribute in the Blue Cabinets around town.  As the clothing is received and sorted, students, working in small groups, will deliver sets of items throughout downtown Ithaca.  In Language Arts, students have spent the past weeks sharing the dioramas made for their Independent Reading Project.  We have enjoyed a wide variety of artistic presentations of key scenes from their chosen novels. We have also launched the beginnings of our research on the accomplishments of African Americans in the 19th century.  Our first experience was a group reading of “The People Could Fly” to highlight courage, hope, and communal support among enslaved people.

Our Second and First Year students have also been excited to bring in the dioramas and memory collections they created for their Language Arts Independent Reading Project. Seeing the creativity and attention to detail in these displays is incredible! Each of these groups will soon be starting their next shared novel, and we look forward to engaging in vibrant discussions as we build reading and writing skills.

The semester-long Research Project has been introduced through lessons in Language Arts, guiding students through the initial steps of topic selection, resource gathering, and drafting guiding questions.  The last week in January began our first official notetaking period in which students explore and document relevant details from their first resource.  Enthusiasm is high – our room wavers between deep silence as students are reading their resources to bursts of excited sharing when an amazing fact is read.

We recently honored the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with research on and discussions about his concept of the Beloved Community and nonviolent action. Dr. King said hunger, homelessness, and poverty would not be tolerated in the Beloved Community because human decency would not allow it. Each Upper Level class examined one of these issues. Our class focused on global, national, and local hunger. After sharing our learning with each other, a group of Third Year students presented to the whole school. The presentation kicked off our Winter Warmth Drive, a great opportunity for our eldest students to step up as leaders.

The Middle School returned from winter break and hit the ground running! Besides a full, active academic schedule summarized below, we engaged in Occupations on two consecutive Wednesdays, including the planning, creation, and consumption of a wonderful Community Lunch! 

Students in our Cooking team, led by Stephen and Anne, have worked hard, honing skills they’ve been developing over the past few months in meal preparation and collaboration as a group to efficiently produce beautiful and nutritious meals for over 50 folks. Meal planning, test baking new recipes, kitchen organization, and skill development in the use of various kitchen tools and appliances have been important aspects of this work. Recent dishes have included vegetable pot pie with a homemade biscuit topping, ginger snaps, green salad with a homemade dressing, among other morsels. 

Our Microenterprise team, led by Patrice Jennings, has gained considerable experience in planning and facilitating the delivery of meals to staff in a timely, gracious way. In addition to tracking and analyzing costs using spreadsheets, they’ve been creating forms to communicate with staff regarding dietary restrictions and to solicit feedback, writing delivery scripts for students delivering lunches to staff, and thinking deeply about the systems and logistics that make a complex operation run smoothly. 

The Land Stewardship and Woodworking teams, led by Jim and Scott Daigler, have spent recent weeks pursuing woodworking projects in the basement and garage workshop spaces in our annex at 124 East King Road. Recent projects include custom lamp posts (ballards) for outdoor lights for the ABR Center patio, a large storage unit for the Primary playground, a new round of Leopold benches (including a special “buddy bench”) for the playground and natural spaces, bluebird houses, and other projects. Students are learning to follow a building plan, measure carefully, use a hand saw to create a precise, square cut, in addition to skills using power drills, drivers, and techniques for sanding and applying finishes. Currently, a bike rack is under construction to better serve staff and students who commute by bike during warm weather.

In many respects, the Occupations curriculum is at the heart of our academic program and addresses a range of the core developmental needs of young adolescents that our program is designed around (as outlined below). Academic learning is not pursued solely for its own sake, although we certainly recognize, appreciate, and nurture plenty of that in our students. Rather, academic learning is prized for its role in allowing the adolescent to engage in community, to put their learning to practical use, and to experience what Montessori called “valorization”, an acknowledgement by the adult world of a young person’s competence and worth.

Math skills take on deeper meaning in the context of the purposeful practical life work of measurement and calculation in cooking and woodworking projects where the results are meant to be shared or consumed, resources are finite and errors and waste have concrete implications–think burned or undercooked food, a missing ingredient or too much of an ingredient, lumber cut too short, pilot holes drilled that miss the adjoining board, among other errors. Similarly, learning to use spreadsheets, derive formulas and equations, work with percentages or proportions in math are grounded in much deeper applications as students develop and track a budget for community lunch or price out individual meals using shopping receipts and recipes. Mathematical applications abound in the Occupations curriculum, and give meaning and application to many of the concepts being studied seemingly separately in the Math curriculum. 

Speaking of which, students have been doing plenty of Math! First year students are bridging the divide between mastery of number concepts, ratio, probability and a knowledge of rational and irrational numbers AND the more abstract world of algebra. Second year students are well along in their algebraic journeys. They repeatedly experience the usefulness of transforming iterative sequences of numbers and geometric patterns into the more concise world of variables, expressions and equations. Students have gained a lot of experience in looking at displays of data in table and graph form, along with their corresponding expressions and equations. Some students are in the throes of studying rates of change and slope, graphing lines by hand and using online graphing applications. Various forms of equations of lines have been introduced. Next up, we’ll be having fun with exponential change, quadratics and systems of equations.

The Middle School continued to be a place of hands-on Science this month as we pursued a study of atmosphere and weather launched in December. We started out the month in science, with a series of hands-on experiments exploring processes at work in the atmosphere. One of those was a classic experiment involving the changes of states of water, from solid to liquid to gas. Students heated beakers of ice over alcohol lamps, taking temperature readings at 30-second intervals as it melted and reached boiling. Students’ data consistently revealed the typical curve of water’s phase changes; using Google Sheets, they efficiently generated graphs of their data that made the comparison of the amount of heat energy it takes to melt ice to that required to vaporize it abundantly clear. 

We recently concluded a series of what Jim calls “the great lightbulb experiments”. One provided a model of angles of insolation that mimics the sun’s intensity at different latitudes, while another modeled duration of insolation mirroring changes in day length throughout the year. Students worked in pairs or threes to conduct these experiments, each student getting their hands on materials, measuring, reading temperatures and recording data. Graphing and written and oral analysis followed lab work and led to interesting discussions of the processes at work in the atmosphere and in our daily experience of weather.

Recent wintry precipitation has offered us perfect opportunities to collect, observe, research, sketch and write about the diversity of forms that water can take in its solid state. Recent episodes of lake effect snow have given us awesome opportunities to observe what we’re learning through readings, discussions and videos. In some cases we’ve been able to use current radar from the National Weather Service and Windy.com to see in the moment out our windows what the radar is showing us on screen. Arctic cold air out of the northwest has brought us snow squalls that we can see taking aim at us right out the back windows of the Middle School. Sometimes we can even see the Cayuga Lake-enhanced lake effect occur on the east side of the lake. We’re so lucky to have this vantage point from campus to watch the sky!

More recent labs have focused on another important feature of weather and atmosphere–clouds! Offered a collection of containers and lids, warm and cold water, and snow, students puzzled and played with how to make a cloud. Mostly, they started by making condensation on the insides and outsides of their containers but had trouble making anything resembling a real cloud. Provided with further information and deliberation, students realized the need to add something into their tiny atmospheres upon which condensation could cling in suspension (condensation “nuclei”). When a match was dropped into their jars, adding a tiny bit of smoke, voila, tiny clouds appeared and persisted based on just the combination of warm and cold air and the presence of the tiny airborne particles. On our second week of cloud making, we heated and cooled air adiabatically (by pressure changes). These “cloud in a jar” and “cloud in a 2-L bottle” experiments were even more visually impressive. Students also learned to use sling psychrometers to measure the dry and wet-bulb temperatures of the air and put that data against tables to calculate the dew point and relative humidity of the air in different rooms of the Middle School, providing still more ponderings of condensation and the workings of the atmosphere. 

In Health recently we have returned to exploring some aspects of our mental health. This exploration has included a gentle introduction to the reality of mental illness in our culture and the importance of destigmatizing it. We then spent some time with an anonymous self-care assessment to help us consider how we can best care for, and advocate for, ourselves. We have also been looking at research that considers how our attention works to try and help us gain a sense of understanding and compassion for our own ways of being and those of others. Along with this we are trying to frame the choices we make each day in terms of how they match with our values and what we want our lives to be like, with a focus on moving our actions away from distraction and into traction, so that we can be growing ourselves toward health and fulfillment. On Friday, January 27, our own Liz Allen shared a presentation on mental health that she offers through her work with NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. This presentation is called ‘Ending the Silence’ and focuses on destigmatizing mental illness.  Liz is the Education Program Director for the Finger Lakes branch of NAMI and brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our classroom. Having a resource like this in our school is such a gift and it was a great opportunity for our students to learn, ask questions, and discover resources that are available to them in their continued growth as healthy humans. 

In Humanities we have been reading short stories from a variety of excellent authors and doing some thinking with them in the form of short written pieces and plenty of seminar discussion. Some of the authors we have received stories from include; O. Henry, Edward P. Jones, Shirley Jackson, Ursula LeGuin, Langston Hughes, and Ted Chiang. We will culminate this exploration with a few more potent stories from Alexie Sherman and Zora Neal Hurston and then have an opportunity to create our own short stories. This investigation has happened alongside a beginning look at some philosophical concepts and theories intended to lead us into forming our own personal philosophies. We are calling it “finger food philosophy” since we are just getting small tastes from a few different schools of philosophy and philosophers that will give us a collection of material to use to help us build our own personal philosophies, picking and choosing what speaks to us. The hope is that the creation of this document will serve each student to ground them in whatever they are doing both at school and in other areas of their lives. 

In a few short weeks, we’ll kick off a Shakespeare unit that will culminate in the production of a student version of a play we’ll announce soon. It’s going to be fun!

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During this week’s Middle School informational webinar, Jim had the pleasure of presenting some of the core features of our Middle School Program. During the presentation, he provided an overview of the ways the program addresses nine developmental needs of young adolescence. This month’s Classroom Matters continues with a summary of these needs which were accompanied by pictures during the webinar.

Foremost among the developmental needs that our Montessori Middle School Program addresses is “meaningful participation in community”. Montessori called young adolescents “social newborns” for their intense focus on themselves as social beings in the midst of a period of enormous growth and change. Much about our setting, schedule and curriculum is geared toward fulfilling this need. Opportunities for our oldest students to interact with each other and with the wider school community, to be seen and known, are prized.

A second, closely-related need of adolescents is “positive communication with adults and peers”. Whereas the early childhood through UL classrooms are full of shelves and Montessori materials, adolescent programs’ settings are relatively spare. In adolescent settings, people–students and, particularly, adults–are the “materials”. The flow of our days and weekly schedules, the organization of our lessons, and the opportunities provided by assignments and projects across curricula nurture and enhance social and intellectual interaction that feeds these two developmental needs. A noteworthy feature of our program is the degree to which student voices are centered and magnified. Teachers may “lecture” and present, but the goal is always to provide a foundation for students’ own discourse and independence. Cognitive development relies on this active process; students are not so much taught, as offered support in becoming active learners. Students are encouraged to contribute and participate, find their voices, sustain their focus and engagement, in the generation of ideas and active learning. Students see themselves and each other as sources of knowledge and shapers of learning and action. In service to this, small group and whole-class collaborations are abundant.

Group work offers students opportunities to take teacher-initiated opportunities to new places as groups of students research, explore and craft unique expressions of their learning. As such, students have ample opportunities to engage with another developmental need — “independence and responsibility”. Offered the opportunity to work together, devise roles and negotiate with each other and teachers about how to best, most authentically present their learning, students are offered generous amounts of independence, and that is inextricably linked to the responsibility of doing so in a meaningful, productive, and satisfying way. 

In a similar fashion, another developmental need is addressed as students engage in collaborative work. “Structure and clear limits” are always in place to help students be accountable, safe, and make good use of their time and resources. While young adolescents yearn to have space from adults, they are simultaneously assured by the structure and expectations we provide them. Our adolescents are often allowed a range of choices and, when appropriate, options to propose their own ways of going about their work, but they don’t have free reign and their proposed choices must be optimally educative.

The Middle School Humanities curriculum led by Stephen as well as our Occupations curriculum offers some of our most evident examples of these first four developmental needs, and the new year has brought lots of engaging and thought provoking activities for our students as mentioned above.

The adolescent’s need for “self-definition” has been nurtured well through this work as well. Young adolescents revel in experiences to explore their own developing sense of self in the context of the ideas and lives of others. As their world widens, they work hard to understand, wrestle with, and incorporate the perspectives and ideas of others. Key to this are opportunities to interact with adults and peers around new ideas, to take up various points of view, to advocate for and defend, or challenge and interrogate them. The developmental need of self-definition has also been fed within the Literature and Philosophy strands of the Humanities curriculum. 

Our “Special Humanities” projects as we call them are rich with opportunities for students to work collaboratively, think creatively and share expressions of their learning with a wider audience. Recent work on our Festival of Lights project around the Winter Solstice reflected that well as will our upcoming Shakespeare production. They address two more of the developmental needs of adolescence — “creative expression” and “development of a personal vision”. Over the two-year journey of students through our program they are offered lots of opportunities to explore their own ideas, and find inspiration in the diverse voices and expressions of philosophers, poets, artists and musicians, activists and politicians, mathematicians, scientists, and many other thinkers. Through these encounters, students not only have the opportunity to  appreciate the importance of those accomplishments and struggles, but to consider their own lives and values in that context. Such models inspire young people to assess who they are now and who they’d like to become. 

Another developmental need of adolescence nurtured by our program is “competency and achievement”. Experiencing success in one’s school work takes on many dimensions in our program, from individual achievements, which are various and many, to collaborative achievements that amount to so much more than the sum of their parts. Students develop competence in numerous conventional academic skills, but they also experience the power of their emerging selves in the context of community accomplishments which require communication and leadership skills, and abilities in social dynamics, goal setting, and project planning, among other skills. Our Occupations curriculum hosts many of these opportunities, as do the Math, Latin and Spanish curricula. 

Finally, a developmental need of young adolescence that our program is designed to address well is “physical activity”. From the first day of school in the first year of our program to the day that a student stands at the lectern to deliver their graduation speech, they grow tremendously. This is as true socially and academically as it is physically. To engage our students’ growing bodies we have daily recess and PE class twice weekly. Adolescents need to move, to interact informally, to engage in imaginative play, to organize games, to simply get fresh air and experience the elements. In recent days, students have come in from recess rosy-cheeked and breathing hard from active play, even on the coldest days. Their energized and normalized demeanors reflect the need for our students to get outdoors and move their bodies.