Yellow Band: By Sea, First Weeks

The students of the Beehive are ready to hit the high seas!We dove right into several different explorations around the idea of transportation by Sea, I'll run through a handful of them. We got started studying the stars, both building a constellation as an afternoon project, and studying how sailors navigated when out on the open seas. We've been doing a lot of experiments around buoyancy--weight, density and water displacement--in order to build small crafts that float, and maybe even carry heavy and dense cargo like rolls of coins. We has an awesome all-school field day, focusing on building a kind and inclusive community here at school! Oh, and we started reading Hemingway! Really!First off, the constellation project and related celestial navigation explorations. What the heck does it even mean to build a constellation anyway?! I don't know, that's why I posed it as a project! One thing we often talk about when selecting projects for both the Tinkering School and Brightworks is that a good project is like a keyhole: it may seem narrow in focus at first, but upon further examination opens up to a world of possibilities and expressions. The constellation is just that! It immediately conjures an image and connection to the real world. There are loads of stories to tell around the stars--just ask the Greeks! Plus, none of us have ever built a constellation before, so there will be loads of neat problems to solve and science to learn along the way.Right off the bat, the constellation group decided that we wanted our constellation to be rooted in real science: show the magnitude of the different stars, convey their different distances from earth, and demonstrate the connection to celestial navigation. We started with reading some from H.A Rey's book, The Constellations, which combines facts about stars with star maps and the Greek myths that go along with many well known constellations. When we got to the part about light years and the stars different distances from earth, we did some perspective drawing, showing a chair from two different angles. This helped us wrap our heads around the idea that constellations that are very familiar to us, like the Big Dipper, would look totally different if we stood on a different planet.After doing some research, and nailing down our priorities in what we'd like to get across by building a constellation, we were ready to get to work! We decided that we needed a 'Night Box,' for the stars to live inside, and that we wanted to build both the Little and Big Dippers, because one includes Polaris--the North Star--and the other points to the North Star. So, If you can find one of those two constellations, than you can figure out where you are! Then, we decided that we wanted the whole thing to be about as tall as the clock on the wall (which turned out to be 7'). Then we got down to the nitty gritty!A regular fixture during morning choice time has been some type of exploration around buoyancy: what types of things float and why? After exploring some different materials like wood, metal and plastic, and defining what we meant by 'float' anyway (if you push it down into the water, it doesn't come back up), then we got started trying to build some type of craft that would carry a roll of nickels.Then we had field day! During our in-service week, we talked a lot about school culture, and wanting to take a moment to emphasize kindness and caring for each other. An all school community Friday field day seemed like a great chance to have some band-specific communication and teamwork focused activities, but also mix up all the bands to emphasize how much we care about each other. Thank you so much to Jay, Nathan, Justine and Evan for organizing and facilitating! And thank you to the Magenta for offering some great activities too! And then back to work! Another of our choices these first few weeks has been to read and visualize Hemingway's classic short novel The Old Man and the Sea. This is one of my favorite books, I've read it many times, so it was a clear choice for a novel for us to get into because, you know, don't dumb it down. That being said, sometimes I have to artfully rephrase things a s I'm reading. But anyway, it's been great! It's an excellent story of companionship and perseverance, there is a lot for us to unpack as we read. We've had excellent conversations about the difference in the relationship between the young boy and the old man, and the young boy and his father, carefully analyzing the descriptions as we go by making drawings to show what we're hearing. On a given day, we probably only read 2 or 3 pages because there is so much rich detail to sift through.And, of course, we've kept up with our morning vitamins because MATH. So far, I'm loving the math of the sea--there is so much interesting stuff to do! Our first exploration is connected to our work on the constellation, the idea of celestial navigation. Did you know that much of our calendar, number system, and organization of time is based on an ancient system that wasn't even in base 10?! True story! The basis for 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. and 360 degrees in a circle is the Babylonian base 60 number system! So, we've been learning how to count like a Babylonian on our hands, and how to record numbers like the ancient Sumerians would too! It's kinda tricky, but a great way to stretch our brains, thinking flexibly about numbers.Armed with an understanding of where the degrees on the compass came from, we went up to the field to start doing some of the basics of navigating. Because, if you're trying to figure out where you are and where you're going, you're going to need to know how to use this tool!More more more to come!