Prekindergarten

Why Can't We See the Sprout?
The students have been investigating seeds, and part of their study involved an activity the children titled "seed smashing." They noted the diagram of a seed in a book and wanted to look inside the seeds they had in the classroom and see if they could identify some of the parts that were in the diagram. Though able to see the seed coat and the seed food, the children were unable to see the embryo in any of the seeds they opened up.

Teachers suggested planting some of the seeds to see if they would sprout. The sprouts begin to pop through the soil soon after and the children began the process of digging around in the dirt to find seeds. Once a seed was found, it was washed off and opened up. Sure enough, the embryo was visible. The children recorded what it looked like inside the seed.

Kindergarten

Secret Service Induction
As part of their studies of Mysteries, the children were inducted into the Nueva Secret Service. The Secret Service is "Level 2" of the Kindergarten Detective Agency, where students are asked to look for needs around the school and secretly fill them. The children identified the needs, which could be anything -- from watering plants to trash pick-up to placing flowers on administrators' desks -- and they tended to these needs without asking for recognition or anything in return.

One student noted, "We are in the Secret Service. If somebody sees us, we just say "hi!" and since we have glasses, they don't know who we are because the glasses are pitch black on the outside. But from the inside we can see through the glasses!"

First Grade

Word Investigation
The students have begun to explore how to be word scientists, learning more about the structure of words in English. Their studies have focused on the sense and meaning of English spelling. Spelling is logical in English, and it makes sense if you know that the number one job of spelling is not to tell a reader how to sound out a word, but to shed light on its meaning (for example, spelling helps distinguish the difference in meaning between the words hear and here).
Spelling also shows the connection between words that are related (for example, the "g" in sign and signal shows that these words are related). Almost every letter in English can be used to make more than one sound and some can be silent (consider the sound "ch" in chomp and in school and the "b" in bake or lamb).

Students sorted words into two groups: function and content words. Content words hold more meaning. Function words tend to help us connect the content words. They began to learn how to build words from bases and affixes, and to use inquiry to investigate questions they have about spelling. For example, students asked:

• "If we spell the words "I" and "a" with one letter, why don't we spell "you" with just the letter u?" This great question led them look at the history of the word you --a word that evolved from the merging of older forms of words meaning you including ye and thou.)
• "Why does the word dance end in an e? Is it there to make the c make the sound /s/?"
• "How many ways can we spell the sound /ch/ in different words?"

Second Grade

Golden Sentences
The students spent the week learning to turn simple sentences into "Golden sentences," i.e. turning a simple sentence about an object into a descriptive, juicy, more exciting sentence. They began by writing sentences about something in the classroom, building on that sentence until it was Golden.

The next day they tried to describe someone based on what they were wearing. Then each child had a magazine picture of a person taped onto his/her back. They had to go around and ask specific questions about what the person on their back looked like and was wearing! Then the pictures were taken off their backs and hung on the wall, and the students tried to identify their picture from the descriptions they had received. Finally, each student chose a sentence from the memoirs on which they have been working and expanded it with description until it was Golden.

Third Grade

Pool Hall Math
The students as a group generated suggestions of ways to investigate the movements of a ball on a pool table. They wrote down theories, made model tables on centimeter graph paper, and tested their theories on at least 3 different tables. Then they posted their theories on their classroom wiki to get responses from other students. Their list of ways to investigate included:

1. Investigate exit corners.
2. Investigate how many times the ball hits the wall.
3. How many turns does the ball make?
4. How many squares does the ball go through?
5. Investigate the shape of the line/design and how it connects to the table.
6. How many triangles did you make? Investigate the area by counting each square centimeter as 1.
7. Investigate which tables are complete and which are incomplete.

Here are a few of their theories and responses from their classmates.

My theory is that all pool tables that are doubles like 5x5 or 4x4 are a diagonal line straight into the pocket that is on the top right hand side. My other theory is that if you have two numbers, for example 4x6, and see what shape the ball makes, add 4x6 and that makes 8x12, and it will make the same shape that it did last time. Then add it again and you get 16x24 and it will make the same thing.
-- Dylan

I had the same second theory as you, but I disagree with your first theory's exception. 6 by 6 works.
-- Molly

My theory is that if a and b are crossed out then the ball will go out of c. If b and c are crossed out then the ball will go out of a. If a and c are crossed out then the ball will go out b.
-- Joseph

But what about paths like in three by six? That's a triangle, and there are others like that.
-- Gavi

I have 2 theories. The first one is that in every square number tables you make, the exit corner will be B.
My second one is that the ball's path shape will be the same path as another table that is a smaller scale or a bigger scale to that table. For example, a smaller scale of 6x4 is 3x2. A bigger scale would be the other way around, 3x2 is 6x4. I haven't found exceptions to either of these.
-- Ana

1. All perfectly square pool tables (2x2, 3x3, 4x4) are "boring" and the ball doesn't go through every square.
2. Rectangle pool tables made of multiples (so 3x6, 3x9, 3x12) are also boring because they are basically a stack of boring squares.
3. A rectangle pool table that has two even number sides (even if they are not multiples) are also boring.
4. A rectangle pool table that has one even and one odd side are "interesting" and the ball goes through every square because this pool table can't be made of squares or multiples

-- Jeremy

Fourth Grade

Tetrahedra, Fallacies, and Homeric Greek
In math, while some of the students invented problems for division in base four, others worked to determine the formula for the tetrahedral numbers knowing the formula for obtaining any triangular number, and still others built a model of truncated tetrahedrons to represent and visualize the triangular numbers in the planes of tetrahedrons.  Some continued their investigations of placing the tetrahedra in such a way to create a giant tetrahedron with spaces of irregular octahedra, finding Pascal's Triangle in the visualization

In Morning Meeting this week, the students began learning to sing the opening of the Iliad in Homeric Greek, using music from an archeo-musicologist in Greece who has been working on what they think it might have sounded like when Homer sang it nearly 3000 years ago. And in philosophy, they began discussing some of the basic informal fallacies: Ad Hominem (personal attack), Ad Baculum (appeal to fear), and Tu Quoque (appeal to hypocrisy), finding examples in advertising and politics, and talking about how they are sometimes used in everyday life.