A Tale of TWENTY Rivers

No, it's not a Dickens sequel, but rather a "listing" of the different rivers each of the students in Room 503 is researching for their individual River Projects.

Today we put them in order from shortest (in miles) to longest. I told the students that I would explain more about why we did that tomorrow, but encouraged all of them to hypothesize as to why we did it tonight.

The River Project is an exploratory/inter-disciplinary project that weaves together science, social studies and language arts. We began it the first week of school and we'll continue it throughout the semester. It ties in, particularly, with our water unit in science as well as with our study of the rise of Western Civilization in Mesopotamia, that we really just began today.

We have mixed reviews of the latest book we're reading, Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, however, the book's themes have made for good discussions and topics for exploration. Last Friday, as I mentioned on that particular day's blog entry, we had a discussion about whether or not good always conquers evil (albeit the discussion ended up on a completely different track). This morning the student's recapped how one can "tesser" or "wrinkle" in time, while this evening's homework offers the students the opportunity to explore whether they believe (or not) that the closest distance between two points is a straight line.

As you know, we have some very creative thinkers (and artists) in our class and today they exhibited their talents in the form of art work depicting one of three characters from A Wrinkle in Time: Mrs. Who, Mrs. Witch and Mrs. Whatsit. Their work will be on display in the coming week, so stop by and check it out when you have a moment.

'Til then -

Cheers,
Ms. Pitman