Intermediate
What happens when students are invited to think of PE games as one of the hundred languages?
On Friday, March 22, the students in Opal 4 were invited to reenact Bacon’s Rebellion. We started the morning by breaking the students up into…
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Creating Shared Meaning around the Idea of Colonization
On February 21, 2012, Daily Page prompt that greeted the students was, “What do you know about the word colonize? You may write and/or draw…
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Continued explorations and discoveries in writing
Last week, the students celebrated and completed the writing that emerged from the year’s first genre study (previously discussed here and here and related to the outing at Camp…
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How did Explorer’s Workshop get started in Opal 4?
How do teacher intentions frame a year of project work? Before the school year started, Matt and I looked over the State of Oregon’s social…
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What does a Genre-Based Writing Study look like in Opal 4?
As we discussed on Literacy Night at Opal School last week, the writing component of Literacy Studio in the upper grades at Opal School is…
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Experiencing Camp Collins
Camp Collins. Thirty hours of being together, facing new challenges and getting to know ourselves and each other in very new ways. On Friday morning,…
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Community, Camp Collins, and Comfort Zones
So much of this time of year is devoted, implicitly and explicitly, to community building. Following are some photos of what community building looks like…
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What happened in “Dive In Day” in Opal 4?
May 14th was DIVE IN day in Opal 4. As students arrived at school that day, they were sent to one of three groups to…
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Constructing Understanding in Mathematics
The students in Levia’s math group have been working for the past couple months on developing an understanding of the associative property of mathematics by…
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Math Workshop Part 2
In the last post I have tried to paint a picture of how we encourage students to use what they already know about numbers and…
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