You know what's totally not cool? Being a grown up.


Like most young children, I grew up thinking that grown ups were these almighty, all powerful, omnipotent beings. Being a grown up meant having freedom to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted.

My view of adulthood as a child.

Oh, but thank goodness I grew out of that silly notion by age 13.  I hit puberty, and knew everything about everything. Suddenly it became very clear  that adults were, like, totally LAME. Dude, they just don't get it.They just want everyone else to be as miserable and BORING as they are, man. Can you believe my Mom yelled at me for playing Zeppelin III too loud?? She totally doesn't get it at all.

My view of adulthood as a teenager.

 I grew out of that when I became an adult. Because it's so awesome to pay bills, go to bed at a reasonable hour, and... hey, HEY! Turn that music down!!! Are trying to get the cops called on us?

No, really. You need to turn that music down, kids. And get offa my lawn!!

I guess being a grown up is ok for a few reasons.  Very few. Actually, I only came up with  5.

1.  I can eat desert before dinner WHENEVER I WANT.
2. I don't have to clean my room if I don't want to.
3. I get to tell my kids all kinds of bogus exaggerations about how hard my childhood was (walking to school barefoot, uphill, 7 miles, in the snow...what? It totally snowed all the time in Atlanta back then).
4. A cold beer on a warm spring day.
5.


Ummmm...I forgot the 5th. Ok, 4 reasons.

You know what is totally cool, though? Being a kid. Especially if you are a Hirsch kid. Every day is a big, scary, exciting adventure. Some days are filled with frustrating big feelings, and some days you feel filled with light and discovery. It's constant growing, learning, changing. You struggle, struggle, struggle to understand something, and then *poof* the light bulb goes off and you get it! 

Georgia Power must've been wondering what the heck was going on over at 705 South Candler street  last week because there were light bulbs going off left and right in our room. It was truly marvelous to watch the kids explore, discover and learn from each other this week.  They produced beautiful music, created geometric art, discovered perseverance and self motivation, and wrote thoughts of comic gold.  All we, the teachers, provided were the tools. The students worked the magic all on their own.

Behold the power of the mighty child:

EXHIBIT A:

Tuesday morning I catch our resident rock star, Paul, stringing rubber bands around a plastic box top and strumming.

 "Hey, Paul," I say, "I have a bunch of shoe boxes in the closet. Remind me to show you how to make a box guitar later on."
Silly me. Like this child needs me to teach him anything about music.
30 minutes later, the kid has not only made the guitar, but is tuning it to perfection. This was not just a kiddie made box guitar; it was a fully functional, legitimate instrument. And not only has he made a guitar, but has captured the attention of the rest of the gang:

Music with Maggie this week totally rocked, shoebox guitar style. Check out the Hirsch band (yeah, Paul is playing guitar and drumming with his feet)

EXHIBIT B:

 "Look! Come here! Look what I've made!"  We look over and see Jakob at with 2 geoboards:

Hmmm..."What's that, Jake?" we wonder.
"Watch!" he slowly flips the boards and...

boom! He flips some more and...

Oliver watches from the side for a minute, and then grabs two boards and some rubber bands, inspired by Jakob's geometric feat. Jakob gives him some tips, and  Oliver discovers his own designs:

EXHIBIT C:

 "Ms. Amanda, we've been making these calendars forever. Do I have to keep working mine?"

This is the first really long term project we have asked the students to do this year. Having the stamina to see something like this through can be challenging. My ADD addled brain knows this well: the minute a task starts taking a little too long and feels a little too hard/boring, I flit off to something else more exciting and novel. But, we all have those tasks in life. The ones  that start to feel like they are never going to end; but they have to be finished.

Pictured above is our class calendar graph. When a child completes a month of their personal calendar, they get a sticker. We've slowly seen the squares on the chart fill up, until, hey, look! 2 children have finished theirs! This week the students were able to see the light at the end of the tunnel as they completed page after page with a renewed excitement and self motivation. For the first week since we started this project, we didn't have to ask "Do you think you should work a little bit on your calendar?" We actually had students ask if they could work on it (one even skipped running club to get a little extra done).

EXHIBIT D: 

Annabella discovered her mighty warrior self when we made magic shields in Norse myths. She also discovered her gift for comedy, as did the rest of our Viking warriors as they provided hilarious (and I do mean hilarious) thought bubbles for our gods, goddesses and otherworldly creatures and made wanted posters for some fiendish frost giants.

EXHIBIT E:

Paul, Tani and Annabella discovered that hard work and teamwork are important elements of belonging to a club. Here they proudly model their hard earned Running Club headbands:

 EXHIBIT F:

We're becoming such independent workers! We are learning what tools we need to help us focus and complete our "contract" assignments each morning.

Journal writing his journal using an outline:

Sequencing the story from beginning, middle, end.

Solving some seriously tricky math puzzlers:

Annabella measuring area

Bo finding the missing addends in number sentences

So, yeah, being a grown up: not so cool. Being a kid: way cool.



Don't forget! Conferences for our class will be held on Friday, April 19th. Go ahead and mark your calendars! Here's the schedule. If you need to swap with a family, please contact them and then let me know.

9:00 Tani
10:00 Jakob
11:00 Bo
1:00 Annabella
2:00 Oliver
3:00 Aidan
4:00 Paul

Parents: There are still tickets to this amazing event on Saturday, 10:30-12:00. It's going to be amazing. Shelley just saw Landon Bryce's presentation and says she was blown away!
http://hirschacademyourvoices.bpt.me/ 


 Pardon my lateness on blog posts. Some of you know I am taking a DIR training class on the weekends. The class combined with the beginning of soccer season for my children (please explain why my son needs to practice 3 afternoons a week and have games on Saturday and Sunday??) makes completing an entire post, let alone one coherent though, a pretty daunting task.

So let's get down to business. You've probably heard by now that our once beautiful aquarium has become the scene of some pretty wretched crimes. In fact, one students said we needed to call in the "Fish Crime Scene Investigation Unit" to figure out what the heck was going on.

Wait, wait...let me throw some CSI Miami your way, because Erin and I have been rockin' it David Caruso style (sunglasses and all): http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/lets-all-watch-david-carusos-one-liners

Date: Somewhere between 3/15 and 3/17/2013
Setting: The Interrogation Tank
Suspects: The Sun Catfish
Crime: Murder in the fish degree
Victims: A whole bunch of guppies

The suspects

Wait, Amanda, guppies? You didn't tell us about guppies.
Yes, guppies. To replace the tetras and plecostomous we lost last week.

Let me go back to the beginning...

Remember all of those sexy fish photos from last week? We were so in love with our new pets. But, part of the risk of having pets in a classroom is that not all children are ready for the responsibility. We know the kids in our room and Heidi's room know to be very careful around our zoo, but sometimes we forget that our friends in the downstairs classes aren't quite such experienced zookeepers. A very quick younger child was upstairs one afternoon for after school Adventure Club ad managed to dump almost a whole container of food into the tank before the teacher could stop her.  We gave the tank a thorough cleaning and all of the critters seemed ok. Well, at first. Apparently it takes a while for fish to die from overeating--about a week.

 Last week, ugh, what a sad week it was. Every day we came in to find another dead fish. One after the other, almost all of our new babies were found floating. We had a funeral for one, but it just got to be too sad, so Erin and I gave the rest of them private, um, burials "at sea" if you catch my drift. The clincher was when our big, fat, handsome plecostmous died on Thursday. That was really tough. Some children had some pretty big reactions, which gave us the chance to talk through our feelings of sadness, anger, and confusion. Our only survivors were the crab and our 2 sun cat fish.

One of the Adventure Club teachers found out and felt terrible the fish were dying off. So she came in Friday morning with a new plecostomous, a new tetra, and a whole bunch of teeny tiny little guppies. And, hooray! Our tank teemed with life again! I kept my eye on everyone during the day, just to make sure no one was being aggressive. It seemed really peaceful. After all, we had been very careful in the beginning to only choose non-aggressive, community fish.

Not so fast, fish lovers. This morning when I came in: guppies gone.

See, now that doesn't make sense, we thought, the guppies arrived long after we had cleaned the spilled food from the tank. So there had to be another reason...

Wait a minute. That Sun Cat Fish sure is looking bloated.

Yep. It was the Sun Cat Fish. After some quick research, Erin reported that our beloved, whiskered fish love to chow down on little bitty fish. How did we not see this? These fish hang out in the aquarium castle all day, so we had never observed any aggressive behavior. But apparently these nocturnal guppy killers had big fun this weekend.

Well, we can't blame them. We practically invited them over for sushi (well, sashimi) by dumping a handful of delectable guppies in there for them to feast on. Needless to say, they are now living in another bowl. We haven't quite decided what to do with them...would anyone like some pet sun cat fish? Happily, we still have a tetra, a crab, a new plecostomous, and a very, very lazy snail.

Conferences for our class will be held on Friday, April 19th. Go ahead and mark your calendars! Here's the schedule. If you need to swap with a family, please contact them and then let me know.

9:00 Tani
10:00 Jakob
11:00 Bo
1:00 Annabella
2:00 Oliver
3:00 Aidan
4:00 Paul

Oh, lord, these critters are cute. I like to call them the death-of-focus crab and the attention-deficit fish. Hours spent staring at these new tank additions, countless reminders "Ok, move away from the tank and get back to work". Every time we get quietly settled into our routine...

"Look! The Sun Cat fish are in the castle with the Plecostomos!"
 "Look, the crab is on top of the tree!"
"Look, the snail has moved!"

And that's just me and Erin.

Yeah, we're all pretty in love with our new tank additions: one cranky fiddler crab, an algae-sucking, prehistoric looking plecostomos, a mystery snail, a bunch of guppies, and a few other little fishies.

Plecostomos is keeping a watchful eye on Bo.

King of the castle

Crab telling plecostomos, "Get offa my lawn!!"

If you haven't read the "Bad Kitty" books by Nick Bruel, you are missing out. Absolutely hilarious. We have been reading "Bad Kitty Gets a Bath" for read aloud.

 Just to give you a taste of how much Bad Kitty loathe baths...

Here are some items you might need for Kitty's bath:

 

Here is a persuasive letter the class wrote to Bad Kitty's owner:

Dear Owner,

My name is Bad Kitty and I don’t want to take a bath!

I don’t want to take a bath because Bad Kitty+water=EXPLOSION!

Also, I could drown in it. And because I am already clean. Also, I don’t like getting brushed.

I do not like getting wet!

I don’t want the soap or shampoo to get in my eyes.

Please, do not give me a bath!

Sincerely,

Bad Kitty 

Then, we wrote one back to BK:

Dear Bad Kitty,

I am your owner and I want to give you a bath. If you don't get a bath, you will get sick and you will not like that. Also, you will develop a hairball. Plus, you smell really bad!

Do you think that a bath is revolting? 

Please let me find you in the tub!

Sincerely,

Your owner

It's a darn good thing we learned how to write persuasive letters this week because we really had to put them to work. You see, Julie Siler came in on Tuesday to let us know that she was ready to contribute our spy mission money to the National Wildlife Association to help out the Canadian Lynx. With the $20 we earned, we would get a certificate and a letter of thanks. Wait, what? Last year we got a stuffed animal when we contributed to help the Mekong Dolphin. Why no stuffed Lynx? Well, Julie told us, the stuffed animals are only with a $30 contribution. But maybe, just maybe, we could convince the ever elusive Agent O to cough up some more cash...but we'd have to have a really good argument. 

 

Just look at these impassioned pleas for more money!

'

"Dear Agent O,  I am writing to ask for 10 dolrs. You should give us the money because it wel hep the animal more. Also, you should give us the money because we wel hav a toy lynx. Just think about the por lynx."

"Dear Agent O, I am writing to ask for 10 dollars. You should give us the money because the Lynx could die! Just think about if you wur an annamul this was dieing."

"Dear Agent O, I am writing to ask for $10 to help a Lynx. You should give us the money because with it we can help a lynx. Also, you should give us the money because we can get the stuffed animal. Just think about people trap it for fur."

Dear Agent O, I am writing to ask you if you can give us $10.00 dollars for the stuffed lynx. You should give us the money because we can cuddle with the stuffed lynx. Also, you should give us the money because we can help the animal more. Just think about the living animal."

We also read a great book and watched a video on the powers of persuasion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMayGIVmfgA

We can tell it's already working, this persuasion thing...by the end of the day on Friday, the students had already built quite a case for getting more money for a stuffed animal, but for getting more fish and crabs, as well. One student was even vying for an eel.
 I think we've created a monster.

I come from a family of huggers, kissers, and pull-into-your-lappers. Earlier this week my 69 year old father, who is scheduled for hernia surgery in two weeks,  attempted to lift my almost 5 foot tall, ten year old son into his arms. I say attempted, because my watchful, no nonsense Mother, who was in no mood to end up in the emergency room with the old man, quickly put stop to it. The same way she put a stop to it many years ago when he was still trying to hug and kiss me and my teenage brother in front of our totally cool, punk rock friends. Oh, the humiliation.

I get it of course, especially since my own two children are very, very affectionate little buggers. But in my big, demonstrative, Jewish family it's not just parents and children showing the love, but brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles greet with full on, frontal hugs and kisses each time we see each other...often resulting in a "Crusher" (Aunt S.), "Mismatched Heights"(Uncle R.) or ""The Way-To-Long" hug (Uncle B). The awkward "Man Hug"? No, not in my family. The men hug just as tight and kiss-y as the rest. As a result, I grew up thinking everyone's family was overly affectionate. I think my jaw hit the floor with an audible clank the first time I saw my (then boyfriend) now husband, greet his Father with a hand shake! And oh, my, did he just give his brother a side hug?? How charmingly puritanical!

And that's just fine. Some of us are huggers, some of us are not.

So, to hug or not to hug at school?  In some schools it's frowned upon to so much as put an arm around a child. Here at Hirsch, we love our hugs. And boy, do we have some little love bugs in our class! For some, it's really regulating to have a lap to sit in while listening to a book, whether its a need for proprioceptive input, or just a need to feel loved and secure, we've always been open to warm displays of affection. We've long had a rule for the "upstairs kids" that when they greet each other we expect that they high five or fist bump,  not hug. Of course, there are a million exceptions to this rule. Some gives you a gift? A hug is ok. Haven't seen your best buddy at all over the summer break? A hug is totally warranted. Your friend is really, really sad because his pet died? A hug can do wonders. For the most part, though, we've told them if they need a hug, they can always come to us. And they still can, but the definition of a hug has changed a little bit. Why? As we told the kids this week, our little love bugs are no longer so little. Suddenly, we have some really big 8, 9, and almost 10 year olds! Heidi and Gudny's class has 11 and 12 year olds! We want school to be a loving and nurturing environment, but at the same time, we feel like we have a responsibility to the students to teach them age appropriate boundaries. There are different expectations for children as they grow up. So, here's the change:
1. The teachers are still available for hugs, but they must be side hugs. Full on hugs should be reserved for Mom and Dad. If they want to sit next to us and lean during an activity, they are still welcome to do so, but such big kids don't need to sit on teachers' laps.

2. High five-ing, fist bumping, secret hand shaking adults & kids

I think this is actually more heartbreaking for us, the teachers, than for the students. *sniff* when did they get so big???

You know who don't need  hugs? The Norse Gods. They are way to busy bravely protecting the world(s) from the forces of evil for silly tokens of human affection. Here's an awesome Diamante poem the class wrote this week honoring theses tough guys and gals:

Gods
mighty greedy
ruling partying flying
Sif Odin Loki Thor
fighting dying living
magical brave
Aesir

There are just a few rules to writing a diamante:

1. Diamantes are seven lines long.
2. The first and last lines have just one word.
   The second and sixth lines have two words.
   The third and fifth lines have three words.
   And the fourth line has four words.
3. Lines 1, 4, and 7 have nouns.
   Lines 2 and 6 have adjectives.
   Lines 3 and 5 have verbs.

Here’s an easy way to visualize all three rules:

Noun
Adjective, Adjective
Verb, Verb, Verb
Noun, Noun, Noun, Noun
Verb, Verb, Verb
Adjective, Adjective
Noun

Next week we will write more Norse poetry, in honor of  Bragi, the god of poetry.

Bragi!

 In Fairy Tales there are 3 Little Pigs desperately in need of some hugs. Or at least two of them, who have lost their homes to that nasty big, bad Wolf. Here's the version they read this week:

Making wolf and pig puppets

Making a wolf puppet

Math:

Here Tani and Annabella explore the many ways to make a number by playing "Go to the Dump". Similar to Go Fish, the players try to win as many of their opponent's cards as possible by asking for numbers that will add to their cards to make a target sum. For example, if the target sum is 10 and Tani has a 7 and a 1, he might ask Annabella for a 2.     7+1+2=10.  If she does not have a 2, she says "Go to the Dump" and Tani draws from the "dump" pile. These two clever mathematicians quickly discovered that they could also hit the target number by using subtraction as well as addition.

Tami showing one way to make 10 while playing the card game "Go to the Dump": 3+3+4

And another way: 7+7-4

Annabellas's way: 7+8-5