Advisory gingerbread houses

Today is the last day to enter your gingerbread house in the first annual gingerbread contest in York Middle School, sponsored by the library staff.  Your entry had to reflect the homes of literary greats.  Therefore, we had people building the cornucopia from the hunger games, there was the grinch who stole Christmas, there was the Wizard of Oz with the rainbow and the yellow brick road, there was Rapunzel's castle, and my wonderful, thoughtful advisory did the three little pigs and the big bad wolf that would blow all the houses down.  They built the hay house out of saltines and covered them with raw spaghetti, they built the stick house out of graham crackers and pretzels, and then they built the brick house out of graham crackers and twizzlers.  There were also many small marshmallows that we put on the ground for the snow, and marshmallows around the edges of the houses to show some snow around all of them.  They also built a beautiful garden patch with skittles, and made the pigs and the wolf out of large and small marshmallows, held together by raw spaghetti pieces as well.  In the end, it was impressive!

The most impressive part of all of it, was how well they worked together.  They thought of the ideas themselves, and we voted on the gingerbread house theme so it was using the democratic process.  The students in my advisory wrote lists of what people needed to bring to work on this project during advisory times.  They doled out the work, so that everyone who wanted to played an important part.  They never shamed or made people feel guilty if they didn't want to participate, and because of it, eventually, everyone did at least one small job.  We had a little workshop going next to my desk for weeks, and I was relieved and thrilled when it was all completed and I was able to bring it up to the library for the display!  How wonderful!  

It showed me that these children are very good at conceiving of a project, problem solving, and working together to complete something that means something to them.  There is a prize of a cocoa party in the library, but for me, the prize was everyone working together, happily boys and girls gluing marshmallows down, and twizzlers on graham crackers and patiently waiting for things to dry so they could continue the process.  Congratulations to my advisory and thank you to the library staff for giving us a fabulous project to work on during the holiday season!! 

Gingerbread house video from the library! ENJOY!!

Jaguar Team Questions about "Farewell to Tarwathie"

I  noticed this week that when the Jaguar team answered questions that they had prepared for the class, they always refer back to the text, or the lyrics to the song.  When I visited the Harkness table a few weeks ago, I noticed that this was one of the expectations each day.  They are all expected to back up their answers with ideas from the text, the story, the inferences in the text.  They always share their answers with quotations from the book.  This is impressive, and it is now showing up in music class when we have these discussions.  We may not have the big table, and I don't have someone charting the course of the discussion and making sure that everyone is sharing ideas, at least a few times every session, but the rest of the method has become almost ingrained in the students' thinking and this is very exciting. You can tell that the conversation is much more animated, and the students are more and more involved and in charge of their own learning. Here are a few questions from this team that we entertained yesterday in our class discussions:

Who hunts beautiful, gentle creatures?
Were they hunting the whale for money or for food?
Are they scared or frightened?
Is their spot for hunting a whale a good spot or not?
Are they frightened or excited?
Did the crew like telling the people about their adventures?
Is this a different time signature?
Who sings the song?
What is the perspective of the song?
What is the song about?
Is the song happy or sad or both and why?
What are the instruments that are played in this song?
What did they use the whale for?
How old is the song?
When the writer was writing this song what was he thinking about?
Is his wife the whale?

I want to publicly thank my colleague Mr. Beaumier for introducing our school to this thinking and discussion process, and I look forward to having more interesting discussions beginning with questions generated from the class.  More soon!