What Did We Do Today?

Wonder why your kids come home so tired every afternoon? We work them to the bone, that's why. Contrary to popular belief, Hirsch is not all fun and games. Ok, there is a lot of fun...and plenty of games. But we're working hard and our days are packed with learning activities. Take a look at a typical Monday:

9:00

After watching "Kung Fu Panda" for Tani's birthday the previous Friday, one student requested a Kung Fu Panda word search for morning work.  Ask and ye shall receive:

This word search, the kids were told, also contains a hidden message...but you have to find all of the words to decode it. We're happy to give you clues, but first lets talk about directions:

If I tell you to look to the south of your puzzle, is that top or bottom? If a word goes from east to west what will it look like? Start from that k and go northeast.

Highly motivating subject+fun directional clues=fun, interactive,  regulating morning work. I usually begin the morning with an activity like this at the table. The students know what to expect and it brings us all together in one place to start the day. Those who finish the activity may choose from a menu of independent "What Should I Do?" activities. Here's what Bo chose:

Here's what Jakob chose:

9:45:

After a snack break,

we continued with some academics...

10:00:


Several students are pulled out for OT and speech, allowing us to work in a smaller group. We are learning a multiplication game called "Circles and Stars". Roll the die once and draw circles to represent the number. Roll the die again and draw stars in each circle to represent the second number. Write a multiplication sentence to show the total number of stars.
For example:
Roll 1=6 circles
Roll 2=3 stars in each circle
6x3=18 stars

We played a few rounds together and then made our own "Circles and Stars" books.

As the students worked, several of them had some great light bulb moments, which I recorded on a chart:

What did they discover?

If you multiply a number by 0, it will always be 0.
If you multiply a number by 1, it will always stay the same number.(aka: Multiplicative Identity Property)
If you switch the order of the 2 numbers being multiplied, the product will always be the same. 6x3=18, 3x6=18. We named this the "Switcharoo Trick", but also learned it is called the Commutative Property of multiplication.



10:45:


Some reread our most recent troll, giant and Thor-filled story from Norse Myths:

others engaged in an interactive reading lesson on the Promethean Board,  imagining that they are skunks, learning why they stink, and who their enemies are.

and one reader researched bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa in a close up look at Microbes.

Yes,  trolls, skunks and viruses. Show me an 8 of 9 year old kid who isn't into one of those topics. Inconceivable.


Several of the students then used their reading words in a reading/spelling/movement activity. Here's how:

First, read the word:

(Yes, seriously. That was Jakob's word from his story. It has something to do with Salmonella, but you'll have to ask Jakob to fill you in on the rest. His knowledge on this topic far exceeds mine...)

My Norse  group used spelling words from the latest story, "Thor and the Jotun Outgardloki".


Next,  find the magnetic letter tiles in word. They are hidden all over the room...

After the letters are found, the challenge is to make as many new words as possible from your letters. Sort them into categories (2, 3, 4 letter words; spelling patterns, etc). It's amazing how far their reading and spelling has come since starting this activity. The best part: I'm not teaching them to spell these words, they are discovering them on their own! Here are the word detectives at work:

11:15:

 By now, tummies are starting to grumble and its time to break for lunch and recess.

12:00:

 Immediately following recess, we have Group Reflections time. We use this 20 minutes to process and discuss any disagreements or concerns, reflect on our feelings and celebrate positive achievements. Sometimes we play a quick group game to highlight a discussion. We have been talking a lot about similarities and differences. If a friend doesn't like something that I like, does that mean they don't like me? For example, I want to play with a stuffed animal at choice time, but my friend wants to play with the Legos. Does that mean we aren't friends? I prefer dogs, but Erin prefers cats. Can we like different things but still get along?
Today's game was a version of "Whoonu?"

Each student picked a card to read aloud. We made a chart on the board to illustrate each students' preference for the item on the card and talked about our similarities and differences.

1:00


We broke off into groups for Fairy Tales and Norse Myths. While the fairy tale folks played "Bacon Chase" and read a new version of "The Three Little Pigs", my Vikings compared a 2 versions of the story "Thor and the Jotun Outgardloki" by making a Venn Diagram on the Promethean Board:

Version 1:

Version 2:

The beginning stages of the diagram:

1:30:

 Our class and Heidi's class joined forces for P.E.
Some chose "What's the Time, Mr. Troll" with one of our volunteers, Jace:

While others decided to shoot some hoops:

A couple of children served as scorekeepers!

2:00:

 

As the day winds to a close, we head in for independent Reflection Journals:

and on to the highly anticipated...

CHOICE TIME!!!

Today, Oliver and Tani choose to explore the "Simple Machines" activity kit:

After choice, clean up, jobs, and then we send them home to you. Hopefully exhausted, hopefully happy.

Surely you've heard of the

Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical

 No?

Then I implore that you all to click this link before continuing to read.

 http://isnt.autistics.org/

This very important advocacy organization sponsors research on Neurotypicals, seeks to inform the general population about this national epidemic, and conducts outreach activities aimed at families, governments, and the public. We are all affected by the neurotypicals in our lives. In fact, you very well could be one without even knowing it!! Take this quiz to find out:

http://isnt.autistics.org/ntscreening.html

As noted at the top, this site is a parody.

If you're out of the loop on the term "neurotypical", here's the Wikipedia definition:

Neurotypical (NT) is a term coined in the autistic community as a label for people who are not on the autism spectrum.^[1] However, the term eventually became used for anyone who does not have atypical neurology, in other words, anyone who is not autistic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, bipolar, or ADD/ADHD, and has been replaced by some with 'allistic', which has the same meaning as 'neurotypical' originally did. ^[2] The concept was later adopted by both the neurodiversity movement and the scientific community.<sup>[3][4][5]

 You know, those people. Those normal people. What, you don't know them? Let me try to give you some examples:

My son. 10 years old. Loves sports. In fact, at age 2 had memorized every hockey team in the NHL. By 4, his love of hockey had led him to hours of lining up NHL cards on the living room floor in abc order and reading the names aloud (Achtymichuk, Kovulchuk, Ruotsalainen, Zalapski...). Thanks to hockey, he also developed an bit of an obsession with Canada. When we went to Thrasher's games, he would sing "Oh, Canada" while the rest of the crowd was trying to hit the high notes on our national anthem. 
 He also fears buttons. The kid will not, under any circumstances wear buttons. No button down shirts, no cargo shorts. As a child, he once threw an unholy tantrum when his well-meaning Grandmother gave him a button down shirt with an NHL logo for his birthday. He wore it eventually, but only after we cut the buttons off. As I mentioned before, he is now 10. And no, he still won't wear buttons. He also won't cut his hair or wear a shirt without a sports logo on it...but that's for another day.

My Dad. Every night as a child my brother, sister and I squealed with excitement as he pulled into the driveway. And then we'd wait. And wait. Because Daddy had rituals. Open and shut the gate 4 times, wiggle the doorknob two times to the left, once to the right, open and shut the door twice. Then, into the house with big hugs! To this day, my quirky cool Dad maintains these rituals. He's not big on change. My parents' house is a shrine to Daddy's idyllic Alabama childhood. The old man has kept everything from his childhood. From matchbooks and napkins left over from holiday parties, to a pack of stale Pall Malls and an unopened bottle of moonshine that once belonged to his father. Mercifully, my patient and creative Mom somehow keeps the house from looking like an episode of Horders. 


Me.  Typical conference between my parents and an elementary school teacher: "So, Amanda is a very smart girl. I just wonder where her mind is. She seems to check out for much of the day and misses a lot of material." Check out? Why didn't they understand, I wasn't checking out? Did they not notice that the crack in the wall next to my seat looked like a lost continent? How could they not want to watch the baby birds outside the window? If I could only tell them about the movie I was writing in my head during math class! 
We didn't have "letters" back in the day (mine, I now know, are ADD...leave out the H). Through a lot of trial and error (a double order of error, please), and a pretty damaged self esteem, I pushed on through and somehow made it through school. And then college. And then graduate school! Yes, I had to work twice as hard as a lot of folks, but I developed some pretty creative strategies to help make it through.
 I now rely heavily on strategies to help me navigate the treacherous waters of adulthood/parenthood. I have three daily calendars; anything I need to commit to memory must be handwritten by me; on my last long car trip to Florida, I wrote every single step of the directions on post it notes (19 in all) and stuck them to my dashboard. After completing each step, I removed the post it. And I still got lost somewhere in south Georgia. Sigh. 


So, never mind. I don't really know any of these so called "neurotypical" people. Actually, I think my son, father and I might be the most "normal" folks in my family.  The rest of my family reads like a  Faulkner novel. On acid. From the peculiar to the bizarre, to just plain out of control, I can't seem to find a single case of Neurotypical behavior no matter how hard I look.

And for that, I am grateful. Neurodiversity is what makes us interesting. It gives us character. It gives us stories. It gives us creativity. Neurodiversity is a gift to be embraced.

But it's not always easy to be different. Especially in an educational system that so values conformity. The belief that everyone learns the same way, at the same pace is just plain silly.  However, the belief that everyone CAN and WILL learn is an absolute.

That belief was driven home as I sat in conferences last week, talking about all that your children have accomplished this year. Congratulations on having such wonderfully creative "neurodiverse" children. They are truly gifted.

According to my calculations, ALL students have improved their reading levels in since tested in early December. Also, this class has seen an average improvement of almost 32 percentile points on the KeyMath assessment...that's an average of 1 school year and 4 months! Shelley also noted great gains on the Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration (VMI). I know, numbers only count for so much (although they are sure fun to throw around when they are in your favor!) I promise you, though, this class looks much different than it did in August. We are more focused, confident, interactive, reflective. We can talk about our feelings, both good and not so good. Though we still have work to do, we have so, so much to celebrate!</sup>






 




 

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