2009-2010. Throughout the school year, teachers and parents supplement the PACT curriculum with activities in gardening, cooking, literacy circles, physical education and music. They provide transportation for field trips relevant to their classroom studies, adding a valuable set of experiences for each student.
PACT is more than a school -- it's also a close-knit community. PACT
parents and students gather frequently for informal social events,
and also more formally for PACT-wide events organized by our Social
Committee. Every year, this committee organizes events for children
and parents like our Friday afternoon playdates, excursions to a
local pumpkin patch, PACT days at the Jungle, Rock Climbing, Ice
Skating, Pajama and Movie Night, potluck dinners, and our annual
Festival of Lights.
Musical Theatre: Life Cycles
Combining science, performing arts, and music - what fun! Second-grade teacher Terri Hygate will accompany the students on her guitar as they all learn songs for a class musical production of 'Life cycles'. Each child is bringing home songs to learn, and some parts of a script. The children are excited for their performance.
Japanese New Year celebration
The children had a Japanese New Year celebration today. We had a lot of fun making origami helmets and pop guns, writing our names in Katakana Japanese writing, and cooking and molding mochi. Parents set up and helped in the classroom with a Japanese writing activity, making origami helmets and pop guns, and even mochi cooking. The classroom organizer sent home origami instructions and the mochi recipe so the fun could continue at home.
"Stevensburg" is an opportunity to bring colonial times to life, loosely modeled after Williamsburg, Virginia. Each 5th grader has a role (I will try to post the list of roles on this site, but not sure if I will succeed) and, based on their role, students will prepare a research report covering both their own life (in their role) and the lives of other people in Stevensburg. Each student will be provided with a paragraph about their role, which can be supplemented with any relevant facts they learn (any Williamsburg fact also applies to Stevensburg - see www.history.org).
The project will culminate with a re-creation of a colonial village (Stevensburg) one day in December, probably the week before holiday break. Students will set up a "town" (with appropriate scenery), wear colonial clothing, perform scenes showing life in those times, and operate shops where other students and parents can visit to buy items and to learn about life in colonial times, just like in Williamsburg today.
The second graders spent a day remembering their ancestors, as learning about the Mexican holiday of Dia de los muertos (Day of the Dead). Each child was given an Ancestor Project packet, with questions to ask their parents and grandparents about an ancestor of their choice. During school time, the children shared information about their ancestors, and created an ofrenda to remember them. They continued the celebration by making papel picado in math (learning about symmetry and positive and negative spaces), and decorating sugar skulls (just for fun/for art). The classroom also tasted Mexican hot chocolate and pan de muertos in the afternoon, and heard some stories and looked at pictures from Mexico of the Days of the Dead. Many parents joined the classroom to help, and our class photographer took photos of each of the children and their projects.
PACT Garden at the new site
The Stevenson PACT school garden could not be started right away at our new location, as the location was still being negotiated. Until the usual raised beds could be established, PACT students planted their educational gardens in barrels outside each classroom. The garden committee chairpersons had to keep up this interim solution while planning long-term with the district.
When the final go-ahead was given, the garden committee sprang into action.
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They set up a workday with sign-ups on the school website and started working on the exact layout. Once this was done they were soon buying the lumber and supplies. They arranged compost and mulch delivery, made arrangements for a sprinkler contractor (as required by the district). Some rosebushes would be dug out so we needed volunteers to give them new homes.
Not everyone is strong enough to dig, drill, paint, sand, saw, and carry lumber around. PACT families found lots of ways to help. Some watched the small children so parents could work. Some brought lemonade or pizzas. Everyone brought equipment like wheelbarrows, shovels, power tools, and sanders. The school hummed with activity for two weekends.
Stevenson PACT school is very proud of our new garden and happy to see our students digging, planting, observing, measuring, and learning.
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Pumpkin Math for 2nd Graders
Each child will be doing a number of math/graphing related activities with pumpkins. We will weigh and measure pumpkins, scoop out and count seeds (by 10s), and graph all our results. This activity takes all morning, and culminates in the children carving a pumpkin to bring home. We will be operating several measuring and graphing centers, and these work best when there are about 4 - 5 parents available to help. After recess, we will be into the 'heavy' work of counting seeds and making pictographs, and then carving pumpkins. The 4th and 5th grade class planned a camping trip to Pinnacles National Monument. The day includes a stop at San Juan Bautista mission, hiking and learning about the Pinnacles wilderness, a night hike, cooking for all 55 students and their chaperones, and more learning in the morning. Dozens of parents coordinated - shopping for food, lending out camping equipment, writing up the directions and itineraries, doing babysitting, and of course, the drivers and chaperones. With such a heavy investment of time and coordination, the class decided to go ahead with their trip even though rough weather was planned.
The first day's hike through the caverns was exciting, with lots of wildlife. The group saw California condors, guinea-hens, wild pigs, and tarantulas. They found bear scat in one of the caves, and some other caves were full of bats. Smaller life abounded too: dragonfly larvae, some really interesting water bugs, and many varieties of spiders and beetles. There was also lots of poison oak.
The campsite was so fun with a stream and rope swings, great big felled trees to climb on, and tons of open space. We had the whole place to ourselves, so it felt even more like a special adventure. The cave hike was really amazing. These caves were not suberranean, but rather were formed by giant boulders falling from the pinnacles and being caught and wedged between other giant boulders. I've never seen anything like it. When the kids emerged from the caves onto the reservoir just below the peaks of the pinnacles, I heard at least four *boys* exclaim: "It's so beautiful!" The kids were all quite good at scampering up rocks, rocky hillsides, and difficult terrain. They got to explore the outdoors in ways that perhaps some of them had never done.
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Right around dinnertime, as the light was fading and a light drizzle fell, someone sighted a condor flying high on the hill right above where we were camping. The binoculars came out, and we were able to sight at least 6 or 7 condors enjoying the drafts preceding the big storm. It was an incredible sight, especially when you consider that less than 172 condors are known to exist in the wild.
We also watched as two humongous wild boars ambled across the campsite below ours less than 100 yards away. Although we were all tempted to follow and see them better (and some were thinking about the sausage and bacon they would make) saner heads prevailed and we let them continue on their journey. A gorgeous doe proceeded through the wash next to us while we ate dinner.
Dinner was delicious and well-appreciated, especially after a long hike and all the work of setting up camp. One of the more temperamental stoves blew up in one chaperone's face, TWICE, as he was stirring spaghetti noodles. His hair and eyebrows were miraculously OK. Three tents' worth of boys washed the dinner dishes in production-line style. They did a good job, even if everything did come out the other end smelling of spaghetti sauce (ha ha). Some kids went on a night hike with the teachers. There was hot chocolate as they settled in for the night - most of it not scorched.
And yes, the tents did start failing sometime after 4 am. It began on the windward side, and extended from there. While some of the kids may have gone back to sleep once they were safely in the cars, I think most of the adults were awake from that point onward, managing triage on the camp until predawn, then disassembling as fast as possible from there. I would be curious to know if anyone got their tents down before they reached failure point: all of those that I helped with had either had the stakes, poles, or entire structure go. Easy-ups, it turns out, are a great bonus in light rain. And a liability in high wind. 'Nough said.
Around 4 in the morning, some of the tents blew down or blew over in the high winds. Some of the parents had to take their tents down and sleep in the cars. It was so windy that shoes would blow away if left outside. At one point all the girls came running out of one of the tents, together. Without their weight to hold it down, the tent (and all its contents) ripped itself off the poles and blew away! The parents had to chase it down.
After finishing his night's sleep in the car, a sleepy fourth-grader asked what we would do next. His chaperone said, "We're leaving!". He thought about this for a moment and asked, "but we don't have to have a regular school day, do we?" Breakfast was less satisfying than dinner - apples, bagels, and granola bars eaten in the backseats of cars, but you do what you can!
In the words of one parent, "Fun and adventure was had by all, some more than others. Thank you for all of the gracious comments, our parents are real troupers. Without the teamwork exemplified yesterday and today we wouldn't have had the great experience we did. With any great extreme experience there is also learning oppoprtunites and I think you will all agree that we have learned a lot about extreme weather camping, and a lot about each other. The teachers can probably pull together an errosion lesson using the examples of what happened to our gear and campsite in the heavy rains and wind."
Another parent summarizes: "It sounds awful, but it was a real adventure, and I'm smiling about it. Monday was lovely. The kids had some wonderful learning experiences and really got to explore a beautiful area of the outdoors together. Tuesday, while not high up there on my list of successful camping experiences, was a great example of teamwork and the kind of can-do spirit that infuses PACT. Everyone pitched in and did what needed to be done, stayed flexible, and rolled with what surprises nature dealt us."
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Combatting Nature Deficiency Disorder in PACT kids
In spite of the threat of rain on Friday night in September, 13
families headed west toward the redwoods of Memorial Park in San Mateo
County. The rain did materialize but it was light and most people
slept through it. It sounded like the storm was much more dramatic
back home in Mountain View. The next morning,
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the kids woke up and
quickly ran to the fire pit where one of the parents lit a campfire.
They said hi to old friends and met new ones, then ran off to play in
the woods. The campsite had many large tree stumps for climbing and
Pescadero Creek to explore.
After a potluck breakfast with tons of tasty food, most of the
participants packed up their things and went to explore. Some went to
check out the nature center; others climbed Mt. Ellen; some stayed at
the campsite and relaxed; and the bigger kids braved the cold water of
the creek to swing off the rope swing into the water hole. A few
families came up for a day or just one night to share in the fun.
Later, we had a potluck dinner with many different contributions.
Some kids practiced their camping skills and we had 4 fires going to
grill the hot dogs, hamburger, chicken and steak. There was dutch
oven cornbread and corn on the cob cooked in the coals. An abundant
collection of salads and fruits rounded out the meal.
Afterwards, the kids and parents gathered around the campfire for
s'mores. The younger children worked most of the day on skits but
were too tired to put them on. The campfire, with its warm glow,
burned into the night with parents collapsed happily in chairs
chatting quietly and looking at the sky through branches of the
redwoods and thinking cheerfully about the next PACT Campout.
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Blast off! PACT families joined together for an evening picnic and rocket launch at the Stevenson campus. Children and parents constructed
rockets from paper towel tubes and rolled paper and launched them from parent-built launchers. Kids added their own special touches to the rockets with stickers, paper streamers, and brightly colored tape. The thrill of pumping up the air pressure in the launcher and releasing it with the push of a button is a big draw at the event, but running after and trying to catch the launched rockets is just as much fun! The children launched until 7:30, when the rocket club shut down the launchers – otherwise they would have been there all night. Countdown until next year’s event….
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These great suggestions for tie-in came from a PACT parent:
I think it would be fun to generate a little extra enthusiasm for rocket day in the PACT community by recruiting a parent from each classroom to do a short rocket activity with the individual classes. I'm thinking along the lines of something that would take no longer than 30 - 40 minutes of classroom time, and that could be as simple as reading a story that has rockets in it for the younger grades. For the older grades, the parent could talk about the history of rockets (Goddard to Operation PaperClip to Sputnik to the first man on the moon), or maybe even some of the physics of how compressed-air rockets work. The parent would set this up separately with the individual teachers. I can coordinate it by making sure we have one (and only one) rocket-enthusiast parent to do an activity with each of the classrooms. If you are such a parent, or if you are the science coordinator for your class and this sounds fun, please send email to me and let me know your name and your classroom number. Rocket Day is next Thursday, September 10, so it would be ideal if the activity could happen on or close to that day.
Here is the rocket activity that I would do for my son's first grade class, which anyone else would be welcome to adopt or adapt. Start by asking the class about air: find out what they think it is and what it does. Then ask them if they think air could hold a person up off the ground. To demonstrate that air *can* hold a person's weight, put an empty two-liter water bottle (with the top screwed on) on its side on the floor and have a student stand on it. The bottle will crumple a little, but the student will still be off the ground. Then, while the student is still standing on the bottle, unscrew the cap, and watch the air whoosh out while the bottle crumples all the way and the student sinks. Explain that the student was being held up by the air because the air could not get out of the bottle. When the air is trapped in the bottle, it pushes against the sides of the bottle with enough force to hold a person up. If you squeeze more air into the bottle, then it will push with *more* force--enough to, for example, propel a rocket at high speed! This is how the rockets work: we use the bike pump to pump lots of air into a small container, and then we open the container at one end (like when we unscrewed the water bottle), so that all of the air (and force) comes out in one place and pushes the rocket the other way. Show the kids a bike pump and let them feel the air coming out the nozzle when someone pumps on it: this is the air that will provide the force. Blow up a balloon without tie-ing it, let go, and show how the balloon whizzes around the room with its "thrust" provided by the air you used to blow it up. After the demonstrations and discussion, if there's time, have the kids draw pictures of air pushing against the sides of a bottle. I don't know how they will visualize the air since they don't know about molecules yet, but I'm sure they will come up with something! Notice whether anyone has the air pushing from both the outside of the bottle in *and* the inside of the bottle out. Depending on the class, it might work to explain that air is made up of many tiny invisible pieces. Hopefully, the activity would whet their appetites for the upcoming Rocket Day!
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Ribbon-Cutting
Class posting day had special significance this year.
For the first time, PACT opened its school year on its
own site, Stevenson School. To celebrate, alumni, for-
mer teachers, district personnel, and the architects who
planned the renovation, joined PACT families at the rib-
bon cutting. District Superintendent Dr. Maurice Ghy-
sels said, "Over the years I have been thrilled by the
collaboration to grow the PACT program. This excep-
tional program does wonders for students with its
hands-on approach that is standards-based and in line
with the District's initiatives. We all look forward to
working together to ensure the ongoing success of Ste-
venson School-- its students, teachers, staff and par-
ents."
Special thanks to Dr. Ghysels, Craig Goldman, Bill
Gould & Associates, Steve Gilbert, the Board of Trus-
tees and the Move Committee for all their work.
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