community meeting – Montessori Muddle

Optical Illusions

smudge-illusion — Look at the figure on the right. Stare at the black dot without moving your eyes. The smudge will miraculously disappear! Try the same experiment again with the smudge on the left. This time the smudge does not disappear. What is going on here? Why does the smudge disappear in one instance and not the other? (Illusion from the Wilderdom Store. Use under Creative Commons Attribution License)

Wilderdom has a wonderful set of cooperative games and icebreaking games that they share for free. They also have a book of optical illusions that would work well for a challenge during morning community meetings.

Their material is copyleft so as along as you attribute them and use the same licensing terms (and cite their Creative Commons License) . You are free to use their stuff as you like.

Poetry in the morning (update 2)

Hope
Know no fear.

Hope dares to blossom
Even inside the abysmal abyss.

Hope secretly feeds
And strengthens
Promise.
– Sri Chinmoy

Poetry in the mornings right at the end of community meetings are going well. We’re into our third round and we’re beginning to get some original poetry. Some students are also asking to do more poetry in Language Arts. We’ve also discovered Short Poems.org but, although I have not set a minimum word limit, we’ve established a good precedent for how short a poem can be and the group is policing itself quite nicely.

Poetry in the morning (update)

Some clichty folks
don’t know the facts,
posin’ and preenin’
and puttin’ on acts,
stretchin’ their backs.

– from Weekend Glory by Maya Angelou

We’ve started poem presentations in the mornings. They are supposed to be a part of our daily community meeting, at the beginning as part of their sharing, but the meeting is such an established ritual that we frequently forget the poems until the end. What’s been nice is that the students have been reminding me about it rather than the other way around. This seems to indicate some interest.

Baku(azerbaijan)_old_city2_monument_of_vahid_poet — Monument of Vahid Poet? (from Wikimedia Commons).

Despite my having presented a couple poems, their having seen a video of Anis Mojgani’s excellent poetry performance, and their having read how to read a poem out loud, I had to do a lot of coaching for the first couple students; slow it down (it’s something I always have to work on myself); put some emotion into the performance; match the tone and expression to the meaning of the words.

Poets_Mausoleum_Tabriz — Poets' Tomb, Tabriz, Iran (image from Wikimedia Commons)

I’m not the most experienced drama coach. Fortunately I did pick up one or two things from the excellent director we found for our play last winter (the importance of projection for example). It also helped that one of the first students to present has had quite a bit of experience in the theater, so, once I conveyed the idea that it was a performance, she knew what to do. Finally, because I’d called for volunteers to be the first presenters, the first few students who presented were not types to be easily embarrassed at being coached and commented on by myself and the rest of the class.

Monument_to_Poet_János_Arany,_1893 — Monument to János Arany (from Wikimedia Commons)

So far it’s worked very well. We’re doing one poem, from memory, a day, with no real theme for the week, rotating through the class. I’ll poll my students to figure out how they want to continue after we get through most of the class. Specific poets, poems on specific subjects, specific types of poems, there are a number of themes I’d like to try/negotiate. If I can get this started as an ongoing tradition there’ll be time to try it all.

Artists sit to the right

With open classrooms allowing lots of movement, we don’t often have to deal with issues of seating arrangements. But, an interesting study (from back in 1993) found that students (adults in this case) who sit on the right side of the room are more right-brain oriented. They tend to be more the artistic types, less cautious in responding and less analytical. Right side sitters also scored higher on femininity on a Masculine-Feminine scale.

Since we’re creatures of habit, I wonder if we can see this pattern in the seating arrangements for lessons and community meetings. On balance though, I’d think this would be another argument (if another was necessary) for allowing students and lots of movement so there is more mixing and sharing of talents.

This seating pattern preference also shows up in where people prefer to sit in movie theaters.

Poetry in the morning

Instead of listening to music in the morning, instead of reading about the composer and the piece, maybe, we could read poetry instead.

The Library of Congress has a nice website with 180 poems for American High Schools, as well as instructions by Billy Collins on how to read a poem out loud.