The sound of silence

I wish you could hear the peace that settles over the table of 25 of us, when we finally begin eating. It is a sound to treasure. This multi-cultural feast is a class tradition.

Third graders (and a few hard-working younger children) help set the table with tablecloths, plates, napkins, utensils, and vases of flowers. Every year before we sit down to eat, we read "Foreign Food," the story of Boubacar, a second-grade boy from Mali, West Africa, who shares a favorite cultural food with at-first doubtful friends. We discuss why I might have chosen to read this story on the day of our feast, and then each child tells about the food s/he brought and why it is special to his/her family.

We sit together at our long dining table (constructed from desks) and patiently pass dishes from left to right--newly adventurous eaters taking small servings of unfamiliar foods. When all of the savories have made their way around our long table and I have ladled 25 cups of hot cider--an unfamiliar treat for my southern city students, the hosts (my assistant and I) announce it is finally time to begin eating. That's when the unimposed silence sets in. Ahhh . . . a quiet peace that I wish I could put in a box and save for later. Happy Thanksgiving!

Everybody Needs a Rock

That's the title of a favorite book by Byrd Baylor, and I believe it's true. Everybody needs a rock . . . . some of us need two or ten or two hundred!

Of course, what lesson is complete without a fieldtrip with Ms. Frizzle and her class? We read The Magic School Bus Inside the Earth as we reviewed the layers of the earth and studied sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks.

Cooperative science teams then acted as mineral detectives, working together to identify a mystery mineral, using a series of mineral tests.

They observed the mineral's color, smell, and luster.

A flashlight helped to determine whether the mineral was transparent, translucent, or opaque.

Next, the mineral was carefully dragged along a white tile and then a black tile to find the color of the streak.

Young geologists tested the mineral's hardness first by attempting to scratch it with a fingernail, then a nail, a penny, and a tile.

The mineral was checked for properties of magnetism and fluorescence.

The mineral's mass and volume were measured and recorded.

Finally, our mineral detectives had gathered enough information to guess at the mystery mineral's identity!

Dave's Down to Earth Rock Shop is a great literature tie-in for classification of rocks and minerals.

Thanks to generous DonorsChoose donors for the funding to purchase our mineral test kits, as well as Fossils and Rocks, Gems, & Minerals field guides!

Do not eat the science

I'm thinking it's a bad sign when you find yourself having employed both oven and stove without producing anything edible . . . or having just visited the grocery store but still without any actual food.

We have been having big fun with geology in room 28!

We began with the layers of the earth--in the form of earth cross-section necklaces, which the children created with Sculpy, starting with the inner core and layering on a blanket of outer core, mantle, crust, and then spots of ocean. How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World is great to pair with this lesson.

The children then worked together to create repeated volcanic eruptions, a mountain taking shape as each new lava flow layered upon the last. "Cooperative investigation teams" then traded their newly formed mountains to take core samples (a good excuse for movie theater clear-straw thefts!) to study the stratigraphy of the volcano and draw conclusions about the volcano's pattern of eruptions.

Bright orange magma in the form of frosting and tectonic plates in the form of graham crackers found their way into our classroom for a study of faults and plate tectonics. Children worked in their "Cooperative investigation teams" to model earthquake-causing transverse faults,

mountain-building convergent faults,

and normal faults.

How Mountains Are Made by Kathleen Zoehfeld was the perfect conclusion to these lessons on our changing earth!