Notes from our communications managers

Science Update: Geology and changes to the Earth

We have been studying a lot about changes to the Earth. We made a chart of different events that make changes at very different rates. Some things happen very quickly, and others happen very slowly. Many changes to the Earth are very, very, very, very, very, very slow. They happen over millions of years, and you can't see that they are happening, but we can find evidence they have occurred.

We also set up our giant stream table in the past few weeks, and have been using it to look at how water can change the land. We noticed that after a flood, the path of the river had changed. We also noticed that the river did a lot of eroding, and it pulled a lot of sand downstream toward the ocean.

Folk Tale Elements

We have been reading and discussing a lot of folk tales over the last few weeks. We made a chart of all the common elements you see across all folk tales and most folk tales. We then illustrated these characteristics.

Then, we picked a few elements to focus on, and analyzed a folk tale to see if they were present. We looked at Gerald McDermott's retelling of Zomo, a folk tale from West Africa. Everyone looked to see if this story had talking animals, the rule of 3, and a lesson or moral. Then, after discussing it with a partner and planning out what they were going to say, students wrote a page of analysis, supporting their argument with specific examples from the text.

The king's foot

When the royal carpenters received a message from the king to make him a new bed, nobody expected to end up in the dungeon. However, when the beds arrived at the castle, there was a problem. A big problem. The king couldn't fit into any of them. They were all too small!

How did this happen? The royal mathematician investigated and found that the carpenters had indeed followed the king's exact specifications. They made beds that were 7 feet long and 4 feet wide, just as the king had measured with his own feet. The problem was that the carpenters all had smaller feet than the king!

After an intense discussion, the royal mathematicians came up with a few suggestions to prevent the problem from happening again:

- get only carpenters whose feet are the same size as the king

- create a tool the same size as the king's foot

- have the king measure all the pieces of wood in the future

We decided the easiest solution was to create a new tool: the kings foot. It would be a ruler, just like he was..