UNFAIR! A Big Idea of the Revolutionary War

A "best practice" of gifted education is to start with the big idea and then fill in the content. It didn't take long to understand the big idea of unfairness as we role-played King George the Third of Great Britain unfairly taxing the American Colonists. As you can see in the last video, we get the big idea but we don't quite have the big words yet!

King George III was in need of money, lots of it. Great Britain had been in several wars and her coffers were empty. So, he did what every needy king would do, he basically said to his Parliament, "We need money. Come up with some taxes. Oh, and yes, tax those pesky Colonists!"

King George III
"We need money! Parliament, do something!"

So the Parliament started making tax decrees!

 1 bean if you have shoe laces

  2 beans if you don't have shoe laces

 3 beans if you are wearing socks. Oh, 3 for each sock!

 4 beans if you have a cat. 8 if you have 2 cats!

8 beans if you have a dog. Each dog!

10 beans if you attend Seabury school!

And so it continued....

The TaxCollector
"Give me your taxes!"

...until the Colonists ran out of beans. It was so unfair. Why was Great Britain getting all the beans and they didn't have any power to say no? What could they do about it?

So the Colonists--well, the Patriots anyway--started banding together and saying, "No Taxation without Representation!!" 

And hopefully King George will start listening, or else....

Grandparents and Special Friends Day

What a delight it is to have our Grandparents and our Special Friends come to our school and see what we do! We enjoyed introducing them, showing them our classroom, making frames for our silhouettes, taking them on a tour of the school, going to the book fair, having our picture taken, having cake and getting a prize! We hope you can come again!!

 

Art for Smart Kids

With the creation of Seabury's new Maker Space and the addition of an art specialist, we are excited to design, create, engineer and invent! 

How to get started? Well, this student has it all figured out.


And here are some of our first projects made from an interesting assortment of materials.

In art class, we looked at the art of Piet Mondrian, a famous abstract painter known for his paintings of colored squares, rectangles and thick black lines. 

Ms Head led us in a discussion about horizontal, vertical, diagonal and curved lines and we then created our own 3D line-art creations.  

The following week Ms Head introduced us to the folk art of Heather Galler.

We took on the challenge to fill our entire space up with color and design in a similar way. We worked hard and long for several days and the effort paid off! A big thank you to one of the fifth grade Innovators who came to our class and gave us advice, encouragement and assistance. We loved being mentored!

Integrating George Washington

To kick off our study of transitions in United States history, we have been looking at George Washington from many angles. 

LITERACY:
First, we read a book by Jean Fritz called George Washington's Breakfast. The narrator in the story, a boy named George Washington Allen because he shares his birthday with Washington, is very similar to our Seabury kids. He has an intense curiosity and a nagging question that he has to know the answer to, "What did George Washington have for breakfast?!" He asks his mom and dad lots of questions, gets help from his librarian, goes to Mount Vernon and finally (spoiler alert) finds the answer only to transition to the next question, "What did George Washington have for lunch?!"

MATH:

We discovered many things as we read this book including the fact that George Washington loved to count stairs and figure out how many days old he was. Some of the Navigators took on the challenge that night at home:

SOCIAL STUDIES:
We then looked at other George Washington books and did some question storming. We came up with a long list of things we wonder about:

GEOGRAPHY:

We got out our big atlases and looked for Great Britain, Washington State, Washington D.C. and the Washington state flag. We began to discuss the transitions from being colonies of Great Britain to becoming the independent United States and of growing from 13 to 50 states.

MORE MATH:

In Math we looked closely at coins, did some sorting and skip counting and played several money games.We also watched a short movie on how and where money is designed and minted.  It was a great introduction to America's patriots, values, symbols, monuments and motto--e pluribus unum. 

ART:

We did some coin rubbings and  looked closely at how hair styles have transitioned from George Washington's time to Franklin Roosevelt's time. We also talked about how we know what George Washington looked like back before cameras were invented and how silhouettes were one way to "record" how someone looked. 

Here's how we made our personal silhouettes with our favorite color combinations. Can you recognize anyone?

The First Week of the 2015-2016 School Year

"Twas the night before first grade...."

Time for a three day weekend!