Tuesday Tasting: Special Guest

Recently, we had a special guest presenter for a Tuesday Tasting. Lisa A.’s friend, who is a nutritionist, came and taught us how to make a delicious and nutritious snack: the perfect parfait! She led a discussion about the nutrients found in various foods and how we can combine them for optimal energy. We learned about some new foods, like chia seeds and hemp seeds, and some surprising things that we could add to our parfaits, like cinnamon and fresh mint. We got to build our own parfaits with fresh fruit, yogurt, granola, nuts, and lots of other delicious and healthy toppings. It was fun to try adding new things to a favorite treat! Yum!

Circle of Power and Respect/CPR/Morning Meeting

Each morning, we start our day by gathering together on the rug to greet each other, review our day, and enjoy a community-building activity or discussion. What’s special about CPR in fifth grade is that the students take turns leading it. Below, the leader chose and ran a challenging team building activity that we learned at camp.

Vocabulary and Review

Some weeks, the fifth graders will read a short essay and learn new vocabulary words. Every few weeks, they will review the past few lessons in order to reinforce their new words. The review activities are interactive, which makes them good practice for the student who made them (writing a story, making cards, or creating a crossword puzzle) as well as the students who experience them. Here the fifth graders are sharing their activities: reading each other’s stories and cards and doing each other’s crossword puzzles.

Sharing Book Projects

Throughout the year, independent book projects encourage the fifth graders to explore a variety of genres and practice choosing “good-fit” books for themselves, and provide the opportunity for creative engagement with literature. Sharing projects is just one of the many ways that students practice their presentation skills. The evaluation process for the projects is student-driven: after sharing their projects with each other, students receive written feedback from each other. Peer-to-peer compliments and constructive criticism require the evaluator to think critically and specifically about others’ work. It also allows the project author to hear relevant feedback from an authentic audience. For fifth graders, who are developmentally very in-tune with their peers, it is appropriate for them to get feedback from each other, rather than just their teachers.

Decorating Pumpkins!

Fall Festival is a highlight of the year, and the fifth graders loved decorating pumpkins for the Pumpkin Walk! Using the skills they practiced at camp, they were in charge of directing the entire process. I stepped back, and they, as a group, figured out how to decide what they wanted their pumpkins to look like, how many pumpkins they wanted, how to integrate a multitude of divergent ideas, who would work on each pumpkin, where they would get their supplies, and how they would either avert or clean up that inevitable painty, glittery mess! It was exciting to see how well they were able to take charge of this project from beginning to end with minimal guidance.

Encounters: European Explorers and Native Americans

Another major area of study this fall focused on the encounters between European explorers and Native Americans. The fifth graders looked at these encounters critically and wondered about the positive outcomes as well as the negative.

We learned that the Columbian Exchange is the term used to describe the exchange of agricultural goods, slave labor, diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres that began happening after Columbus’s first trip to the Americas in 1492.

Did you know that Italians got tomatoes from the New World, and the Spanish were the first to introduce horses to the Native Americans? A lot of the foods we love were first shared because of the Columbian Exchange. During our Tuesday Tasting Time, we all brought in and tasted a variety of familiar and not-so-familiar foods that were traded because of the Columbian Exchange.

At the beginning of October, some people observed Columbus Day. Usually, the story of European arrival in the New World is told from the European point of view. As a class, we read a short story called Encounter that gave us a new understanding by describing the arrival of Columbus from the perspective of a Taino boy who lived on an island in what is now the Bahamas. In addition, one of our texts this year is Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States. This wonderful book provides alternate perspectives to those generally found in history books, which deepens our understanding of historical events. The chapter on Columbus and the Indians offered facts and stories that broadened our understanding of the encounter from both Columbus’s and the Native Americans’ points of view and gave us information with which to make our own critical evaluation.  

We learned about the good and the bad parts of the Columbian Exchange, and that made us wonder whether or not Columbus Day should be celebrated. Jesse taught us how to use Google docs, so we made a chart where we could all contribute our thoughts throughout our study. Then, we used our ideas to write critical 5-paragraph essays about the upsides and downsides of celebrating Columbus Day.

Each fifth grader also chose an explorer to study for a research project. We wondered about the facts of their exploration, and we were also curious about how their exploration affected others and the world. After reading a variety of sources and taking notes, the fifth graders created Explorer Scrapbooks, which included a five-paragraph essay, visual elements, a map of the explorer’s travels, and a timeline of their life.

The fifth graders practiced so many skills during the course of this project, including collaboration of ideas, critical thinking, using technology for real-world applications, nonfiction reading skills, research skills, and writing an essay. My favorite, though, was watching every student interact with our world map in a meaningful way. Because it was integral to their research, each student had to look closely at the map in ways they hadn’t before in order to find places that they may have never heard of (“Where IS the Strait of Gibraltar?”). Spending time looking at the map was not something I “assigned”; rather, it was learning that happened because of genuine curiosity and a desire for understanding. There was lots of collaboration between students, and there were many conversations about where places were around the world: just the kind of learning that sticks!

Family Heritage Project and Feast

Our family heritage project was a long-term project that we worked on since September. Because the fifth graders study the history of the United States, which is a land of immigrants, they wanted to find out where their own families came from and how they ended up in the United States. This project was multifaceted and allowed the students to practice skills in many curricular areas, including writing, research, technology, and social studies.

We started by reading the story, The Matchbox Diaries. It is about a grandfather who is telling his granddaughter his immigration story using special items that he collected during his childhood and on his journey from Italy to the United States. Each fifth grader made their own shoebox diary with an important family item in it, and they also wrote the story of the object.

Each fifth grader also made a family tree that went back five generations (or as far as possible). They found out interesting facts and stories about their ancestors and enjoyed sharing them with each other. Typing up the names for the family trees and the family immigration stories were a chance to practice keyboarding skills and how to format Word documents.

Writing narratives and essays is a main focus of fifth grade language arts, so the students wrote an immigration story about a relative who immigrated to the United States, retelling their story with historical details. As always, they went through all the writing steps: planning/organizing, rough draft, self edit, peer and teacher edits, revision, and final draft.

During technology time, Jesse helped us create a multimedia presentation using Google Earth to show the route someone in our family took to come to the United States. We’ve had lots of fun exploring all of the things that Google Earth can help us do and see.

Right before Thanksgiving Break, we celebrated with a Family Heritage Feast, where the fifth graders shared all of their projects and learning with family members and each other. We enjoyed a delicious buffet of favorite family recipes that the students had found and wrote about: what the food is, where it’s from, why it’s important to their family, and if there’s a special time of year when they make or eat it.