Orange Band: Human, Week 9 & 10

At the beginning of this week I was King Kong.Ramses fills in my salutation on Monday's morning message.We're working hard to integrate skills work into our project work. This looks like writing a checklist of what we'd like to accomplish every week, measuring and including dimensions in our design drawings, researching and taking notes from books and videos that inform our projects.Sadie watches a video demonstration of a new type of suture--aka stitch--and takes notes.Sadie's first few practices of the running subcuticular suture using felt and embroidery floss. This week, she started to use a curved suture needle!Oscar explains his design drawing to me.Tesla tries out paracord as a material to represent larger blood vessels.But first Emilio had to untangle his spinal cord.On Tuesday, in Math Workshop, we compared the number machines we've been practicing to ratio tables we worked on earlier in the year. We noticed that predicting the future using these two different types of tables looks very different. In a ratio table, we can double like 5 to find the answer to like 10. But in a number machine, we jump forward or back depending on the pattern. Huh. After sitting with this puzzling difference while playing some board games, we came back together to try and define what exactly is the difference. After a few different proposals, we realized that we could describe the workings of each table using different mathematical operations! Our number machines are ruled by addition, and our ratio tables are ruled by multiplication (which can also be represented with addition). Wowee! We just defined what it means to add and what it means to multiply! We can go in so many different directions with this... stay tuned!When playing chess, remember to think about spheres of influence.OH, and considering all of the hard work we've put in at the Treat Commons Garden, we decided it was time to put down some roots--scallion, cucumber and radish roots to be more precise.Putting down roots required scooping some dirt from the compost bin first.And making some friends.With 4 (four!) entries in the journal this week, we had a lot to talk about at Class Meeting. So, I decided to focus our discussion on the art of apologizing. As we've discussed before, if you have friends, you will both hurt your friends feelings and have your feelings hurt by your friends. So, you've got to know how to apologize and what to do when someone apologizes to you. Here are some basic steps:

  1. Use the words, "I'm sorry."
  2. Acknowledge that you made a mistake, and describe how it was that you made a mistake.
  3. Acknowledge how it was that your mistake resulted in your friend's hurt feelings.
  4. Ask for forgiveness.

Easier said than done, that's for sure! But for these young kiddos, they've got nothing but practice ahead.Oh, and we kept making art together.Herve Tullet's 'Traffic Jam' workshop.Herve Tullet's 'Traffic Jam' workshop.BEEP BEEP!

Piper Alldredge1960 Bryant St-, 2015-2016, arc:human, orange band, SF Brightworks