All Roads Lead to Learning

Reading and Research

  Ninth grade English students read a non-fiction books, such as Little Princes by Conor Grennan, A Long Way Gone by Ismael Beah, Enrique's Journey by Sonia Ensario, Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg, Daring to Drive by Manal Al-Sharif and A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea by Melissa Fleming. Students then did research on an issue related to the book and wrote a persuasive speech that identified a social problem and possible solutions. Students incorporated information from their research and created a bibliography. Teacher-librarians modeled effective research techniques and gave students feedback on their bibliographies and students revised them.

The Collapse of a Civilization

What does the collapse of a civilization and design thinking have in common? Global 1 students are learning why a civilization collapses by studying Jared Diamond's ideas presented in his book. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Students are creating a Rube Goldberg machine that simulates how civilizations like the Easter Island, Angkor, Anasazi, and Norse Greenland collapsed. Students used design thinking to plan out the machine in order to demonstrate how the effects of one factor of collapse, like deforestation, could lead to another factor of collapse, starvation. After reading and thinking about the collapse of a specific civilization, students got to work designing their Rube Goldberg machines.

Students then set to work to build their machines in the makerspace. They documented their progress each day and noted successes and failures in design.

The machines are teaching tools used by students to explain why a certain civilization collapsed.

Power of Words

    Junior English students saw a one-man play called Frederick Douglas: An American Slave by Daniel S. Campagna at the Kline Auditorium, which highlighted Douglas'writings and life. A copy of the play is available in the library. Students also participated in a panel discussion and saw an original version of Douglas' book, Life and Times of Frederick Douglas, printed in 1882 by the Park Publishing Company in Hartford, Connecticut.