Taking A Stand

My class recreated the painting The Death of Socrates for our school’s Pageant of the Masters-style production.

Death Of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

In the painting, we see the final moments of Socrates’ life as he grasps the cup of hemlock. He could have easily escaped prison, but chose to stand by his convictions and chose death by poison.

Big Questions:

• Is it right for Socrates to chose death to stand up for his beliefs?
• What are the effects of such a sacrifice?
• What would be the effects of choosing to escape and survive?
• Which would lead to the greater good?

The Truth of History

Socrates’ life is a mystery. He is only known through his student Plato’s writing.

First, this leads to a fun discussion. We imagine a student carrying on my teachings after my death, writing and discussing my ideas. I’m sure you know the one in your class that makes this situation funny.

But then (if you’re brave), ask your students to think of two different ways to portray you, from two different points of view. Neither has to be a negative.

Which is correct?

This opens up the concept of questioning Plato’s written history. How do we know the accuracy of Plato’s writings? Was he even trying to be completely accurate, or was he using Socrates as character to prove a point? Do we really know anything about Socrates?

Make the question larger and more abstract: How we can trust history?

The Power Of Questions

Finally, Socrates is famous for his Socratic Method. It has frustrated and enlightened students for centuries. A question is only answered with another question.

Socrates engaged in questioning of his students in an unending search for truth. He sought to get to the foundations of his students’ and colleagues’ views by asking continual questions until a contradiction was exposed, thus proving the fallacy of the initial assumption. From University of Chicago’s Law School

Ask your students to think about the power of questions:

• Which is more powerful, a question or an answer?
• What questions might have led to (The American Revolution, Women’s Rights, The Internet).
• What everyday activity can you question?

Let me know what you come up with! Please email me at ian@byrdseed.com or on Twitter at @ByrdseedGifted.

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M.C. Escher’s Metamorphosis II

As a gifted kid, M.C. Escher fascinated me. Without a doubt, he continues to fascinate the gifted kids I work with. Here are some links to inspire a study of Escher in your classroom.

Escher & LEGO

There’s something about the combination of Escher and LEGO that gets the creative juices flowing. Here’s a sampling of what’s out there:

• Several Escher works reproduced in LEGO from. This one features Waterfall
• Several more LEGO reproductions, this time from Henry Lim.
• A space LEGO version of Relativity
• A medieval LEGO version of Ascending and Descending
• A LEGO take on the tessellation Sky and Water

Tessellations

Tessellating figures is a math standard for my grade level, so I always take the opportunity to create some Escher-inspired tessellation art.

• An easy method to develop tessellations. I’ve used it many times with students, and even made one myself when I was ten.
• Building on the previous, a PDF with more advanced options for tessellating
• Finally, create tessellations that evolve across the page by using tile morphing. Now your kids can create the next Metamorphosis II!

The Math Of Escher

For the serious Escher fan, two PDFs from the American Math Society about the math behind his work:

• “The Mathematical Side of M. C. Escher” by Doris Schattschneider
• “The Mathematical Structure of Escher’s Print Gallery” by B. de Smit and H. W. Lenstra Jr.
• And, building on the last, further analysis into Escher’s fascinating Print Gallery.

Finally, what if childhood Escher’s drawings were graded by a stereotypical teacher?

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Here are my three favorite young adult novels with gifted females as main characters. Each protagonist struggles to balance her abilities with others’ expectations. None rely on tired cliches or overused school settings. And each novel is so well-written that I read them on my own during summer break!

The Westing Game

The Westing Game, a Newberry Winner, is a hilarious page-turner that exposes students to the mystery genre. The story has a giant cast of hilarious characters, each partnered up into unlikely duos, leading to great character analysis activities.

Most importantly, The Westing Game features Turtle, a strong, young female lead. She’s precocious, clever, and physically tough. She’s a gifted girl who isn’t a nerd, stands up to older boys, and sacrifices her reputation to protect her older sister’s. Yet somehow she doesn’t fit in with anyone.

A Wrinkle In Time

This classic science-fiction story features a group of youngsters traveling across space to rescue a missing father. The lead, Meg, is another gifted female who has trouble fitting into any box. She’s extremely intelligent, yet struggles in school. She’s athletic, yet remains unpopular. She knows she has strong emotions, yet cannot understand them.

Meg’s highly gifted younger brother, Charles Wallace, adds another layer of depth. Nobody knows what to make of this freakishly intelligent child. He is Meg’s closest friend, yet even she can barely understand his incredible leaps in logic. Your students will definitely struggle to figure out his motivations.

From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

The Mixed Up Files is a run-away story turned mystery that features another fascinating gifted female. Claudia Kincaid runs away with a carefully prepared plan. She even includes her wealthy younger brother so that he’ll foot the bill. They spend their nights in the Modern Museum of Art in New York, eventually stumbling across a mystery involving Michelangelo.

Claudia is a deep, well-written character. She is dramatic without being cliche. She wants to correct her brother’s grammar at every turn, yet knows that she must hold back to keep him on her side. Her down-to-earth brother provides a hilarious foil to her own multi-layered motivations.

Claudia demonstrates the complexity of being a gifted young girl. On one hand she has the power to out think and out do those around her, yet she tries to control this power in order to fit in. When she can’t fit in, she struggles frantically to find an identity.

Have any novels that feature a great, gifted female lead? Let me know at ian@byrdseed.com or @byrdseedgifted!

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Last month’s paradox post was very popular, so here’s another.

These are a blast to share with kids. Use them to help students think through a complex problem, finding all possibilities. Work on the ability to articulate thinking. And, naturally, have them find and create their own.

Pinocchio’s Nose

Pinocchio says, “My nose will now grow.” What will happen?

Zeno’s Paradox of the Course

In order to arrive at a location, you must first get halfway there. To go a mile, you must first go 0.5 mi, but to go 0.5 mi you must go 0.25 mi, but to do that, first you must reach 0.125 mi, etc.

Since you’ll always have half of a distance left, you’ll never actually reach your location.

The Crocodile’s Paradox

There is a crocodile, a child, and a father. The crocodile has stolen the child. He promises the father that he will return the child if the father is able to predict whether or not the crocodile will return the child.

The paradox arises if the father correctly predicts that the crocodile with keep the child. If the crocodile returns the child, as promised, he is violating the correct prediction.

Discovered on Wikipedia.

Have any favorites? Share with me at ian@byrdseed or @byrdseedGifted.

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I shot a series of three images, focusing differently each time, to show the power of taking a fresh look at a topic. Without even moving my camera, I’m able to see three completely different scenes.

First

Here’s a leafy, green plant against a blue sky with a building in the background. A simple scene without much complexity.

Far Away

Suddenly the trees in the background have become clear, changing our entire perception of the scene. At first, I wasn’t even aware that those trees were there. Now they are obvious and dominate the image.

Close Up

Finally, focusing in a third way reveals a new detail: the browned and dry tip of a leaf. Before the change of focus, it was right in front of us yet also completely unnoticeable!

Want to illustrate this idea for your kids? Here’s a powerpoint of the three images.

Applications

A simple shift of focus adds an immediate layer of complexity and novelty that excites students. It gives them a new way to engage in grade-level curriculum, and doesn’t take hours of work from teachers.

Three quick ideas:

• Students sit alone at lunch while classmates pass them by. Can students’ refocus their attention to see and help their peers?
• We focus our discussion on main characters. Can students refocus on a minor character in a story, drawing out new insights?
• In a solar system lesson, the planets are naturally the focus. Can we refocus on planets’ moons and gain new understanding?

Ideas? Please email me at ian@byrdseed.com or find me on Twitter as @byrdseedGifted.

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The app is billed as an “interactive book,” and features experiments kids can perform on their own, investigating optical illusions, light, and color. It features beautiful imagery as well as video.

Here are some of the specific activities:

• observe how our eyes invert colors
• learn to see the individual pixels of the iPad’s screen
• combine colors optically to create new colors

Color Uncovered is free and is a blast for kids and adults to play with.

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The addition of a single word can take students’ thinking to a new dimension. Those familiar with depth, complexity, and the content imperatives have experienced this. Dr. Sandra Kaplan, a creator of these tools, also developed a set of “key words” that are, unfortunately, nearly impossible to find online. The best resource I’ve found is my colleague, Marcie Griffith’s, presentation (pdf). See page five for the list.

My problem with these key words is that there are way too many words, and their subtle differences lead to overwhelmed, confused kids. So I like to work with a small subset. My two favorites are: motivation and consequence.

Character Analysis

Throwing motivation and consequence into a character analysis question quickly jolts the thinking level:

Now kids are considering a deeper aspect of this simple story. Why did the pig act the way he did?

This question seems rather similar, despite the more advanced vocabulary. But let’s combine it with a prompt of depth for increased power!

What ethical consequences were there in choosing bricks?

Now you can get kids thinking in whole new directions: was there a downside to choosing the brick?

Some little genius might suggest the environmental impact of creating bricks versus using the easily renewable sticks and straw. Perhaps there is a negative economic effect of using bricks for a house.

Now students can evaluate the choice in a whole new light. And all we did was add a couple words to the question.

Social Studies

But these words aren’t just useful in literature response. Let’s see them in action in social studies.

Don’t Forget Bloom!

These questions, while higher level, are still using “identify” as the thinking skill. Let’s super-charge this thinking with higher-level skills, such as “evaluate” and “create”:

• Judge Washington’s motivations for rebelling against England. Was the risk justified?
• Imagine that Washington led a rebellion in the modern day. Create realistic motivations for this action.
• What were the consequences for Washington’s successful revolution? Now evaluate his actions from the British perspective. What consequences would have been appropriate from their point of view?

Simple Changes, Big Results

You don’t need a masters degree in American History to develop these questions. You don’t need a weekend to create intricate prompts. A few minutes with a few simple tools leads to some great complexity.

And yes, I’ve started adding these into The Differentiator

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This article is written by Katie Haydon, founder of Ignite Creative Learning Studio.

One of my favorite paintings is Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884, housed prominently in the Art Institute of Chicago. It lends itself to endless classroom applications across content areas: art, history, science, creative writing, French foreign language, and literature. You can even work math into this masterpiece, challenging your students to first estimate the number of dots on the roughly ten foot wide by seven foot tall canvas and then figure out how to prove their answers in 15 minutes or less. As a simple activity, early elementary students can count the number of people, boats, and animals (to save you time: there are 48 people).

Bring the Field Trip to You

Google Art Project is an exciting way to bring rich works of art right into your classroom. It started with collections from 17 partner museums around the world and has grown to 151 museums. They photograph works of art in high resolution so the images yield exceptional detail and then post these images in galleries on the website. Just recently, they began adding the Art Institute of Chicago’s collections, including Sunday Afternoon.

Using Google Art Project

Go to the main website, googleartproject.com.

From there, try browsing by collections listed by museum, artist, artwork, peruse other user galleries, or enter a specific search term.

Once you select a painting here’s Sunday Afternoon, a host of options appears by clicking “details” next to the work’s title. There is historic information about the painting, a video to watch, and a map denoting the artist’s location.

Even more exciting, if you click on the little orange and green man icon to the right of “details” you can walk into the gallery on a virtual tour like Google Street View, and explore the actual gallery in which the painting is housed.

Introducing “La Grande Jatte”

Though Google Art Project is an effective tool, I have been using a laminated poster for years for these activities. To get started and peak interest, I hang the poster on the wall or board, and share a few basic details, including the title.

Georges Seurat began painting this in France in 1884. He didn’t finish until 1889. What do you observe about this painting? Come closer if you’d like to see better (or zoom in on the image).

[Possible responses: There’s a monkey on a leash! What is that man doing smoking a pipe? Wow, that lady in front has a big butt. And the one you are looking: It is painted with dots!]

Yes! This painting was painted completely with dots. Does anyone know what that technique is called? Pointillism. Can you imagine painting this whole poster with dots? Well, do you realize that the actual painting was much, much bigger? Then, I mark out a space 10 feet wide by 7 feet tall. How long do you think this would take?

Content Activities

The above is a simple jumping off point, and you can choose your own adventure from here. Is your goal to engage the class in an art lesson? Would you like to include more detail about the history surrounding the painting, impressionism, Seurat’s life, his process of painting?

Here are some ideas on how to tie into content areas using this painting as a catalyst:

History and Geography

Seurat alluded to historic art such as Italian Renaissance frescoes, and Egyptian and Greek sculpture. The painting is set in Paris on the island named La Gran Jatte in the Seine River. There is interesting history about the painting that can be found in books or online.

Science & Color Theory

Seurat was calculated in his use of pointillism. Complimentary colors are key to the vibrancy that he achieved. You can go in-depth into color theory, color mixing, the color wheel, science of light, pigmentation, and much, much more.

Creative Writing

After the short introduction above, continue to engage the students in their observations about the scene. To their earlier point, why does the lady’s derriere look so large? Why are they all dressed up in the park? What are people doing?

Then, the kicker: If you could jump into this painting as a person or object pictured, which would you choose? Start with a class example and choose a character in the painting. Then, ask the class to describe what that person is observing, doing, smelling, tasting, feeling. Write their responses line by line on the board, asking leading questions to get detailed and high-quality responses. When they have 7 to 10 lines, read it back to them and say, “This sounds like a free-verse poem.” Then have each member of the class choose a character, “jump into the painting,” pretend to be the character, and record the character’s observations as a free-verse poem.

Here’s an example of the initial group poem from a class of first and second graders:

Response to “Sunday Afternoon on La Gran Jatte”
(From the point of view of the man with the pipe)

Can people please give me more space?
I wish I had a different day off than everyone else.
All this noise is making me cross.
Children screaming
Babies crying
Monkeys hollering and acting crazy.
I am dreaming of a quiet, lovely park
with children taking naps
so that I could admire nature’s beauty.

Art Project

Before class, cut 8.5” x 11” water color paper (or cardstock) into fourths, one per student. Buy a box of cotton swabs and hand out three per student. Ask each child to lightly sketch a nature scene (if desired give them magazine cut-outs or calendar pages for ideas, or go outside and do plein air sketches). Bring a color wheel and demonstrate the concept of complimentary colors. Let the students experiment with complimentary colors and paint (tempera works well), making dots with their cotton swabs. Once they understand how complimentary colors work, students “paint” their sketch using only dots with their cotton swabs. No strokes allowed!

Depending on your goals, you can go in-depth in any of these content areas, or others of your creation. The point is, there now exists an accessible platform to bring art into your classroom, and there are so many ways of doing so that help you to meet your specific standards goals while broadening your students’ horizons, knowledge of culture, ability to critique and interpret a painting, creativity, and other academic subjects.

Extras

Check out the “education” section of Google Art Project. There are some outstanding activities and challenges for you or your students. The DIY section allows you to create and post your own ideas.

P.S. Though we have these incredible means of opening our students’ worlds to art these days, nothing beats seeing the actual work, in person. If you live in Chicago, see if you can arrange for a field trip. The Art Institute has outstanding teacher resources, including a resource library that you can visit free of charge for access to lesson plans and other resources.

Katie Haydon, founder of Ignite Creative Learning Studio, is a teacher, nationally-known writer and speaker, and a mentor to students of all ages. A life-long learner herself, she loves to find the most creative, innovative, hands-on ways to present math, writing, history, and science to kids. She has taught second grade, Spanish, creative writing, and journalism at Monica Ros, Topa Topa, and Valley Oak Charter schools in Ojai,CA, and creative writing at the Center for Gifted in Chicago. Katie is a published author on teaching, parenting, and early foreign language instruction, and her work was recently featured in Igniting Creativity in Gifted Learners, K-6, edited by Joan Franklin Smutny. A graduate of Northwestern University, Katie majored in Spanish and Latin American language, literature, and culture, and minored in economics. She serves on the Torrance Legacy Creative Writing Awards committee for the National Association for Gifted Children.

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Paper

The iPad app Paper is a beautiful sketching app. It makes my drawings and handwriting look better than in real life. Paper is free, but includes several optional $1.99 upgrades to buy markers, watercolor brushes, and pencils in the app. I purchased one extra, but mostly just use the built-in pen tool.

Let’s Project It!

As soon as I started doodling with Paper, I immediately wanted to use it in class as on the overhead. The problem, of course, is how to get the iPad screen onto my LCD projector.

The answer is a second app called Air Server. This $15 app goes on your Apple Laptop. When it’s running, everything on the iPad’s screen appears on the laptop screen. Hook the laptop up to an LCD projector, and everything on the iPad screen projects onto the overhead screen. This all happens wirelessly, so you can roam freely around the class.

The Caveat

To accomplish this, you need either a second or third generation iPad. Your iPad also has to be on the same WiFi network as your latop, so they can communicate.

If you have the original iPad, you can still buy a VGA adapter and plug directly into your projector, but then you are wired and have less freedom to walk around.

A Stylish Stylus

The final piece to this puzzle is a writing tool. Writing with your finger gets annoying quickly, so might want to buy a stylus. A very popular iPad stylus is the The Cosmonaut. It’s $25 and looks like a huge black crayon. It works beautifully with the Paper app, and makes writing clearer and drawing easier.

• Paper for the iPad
• Air Server for your Mac
• The Cosmonaut

Next on sAppurday

Next sAppurday, we’ll look at a really cool, colorful app put out by a museum in San Francisco.

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Lewis Carroll’s word puzzles, world’s fastest robot, defining “squareness,” Yosemite over time, Charlotte Remixed, play-doh electronics, and developing a deeper understanding of fraction addition. All originally shared via Twitter, where I’m http://twitter.com/byrdseedGifted.

• Word Ladders Fun, simple word puzzles invented by Lewis Carroll. Great as a daily vocab builder.
• Video: World’s Fastest Robot Sets Speed Record. The title says it all!
• Great geometry and ratio work on defining “squareness” from @k8nowak. What makes a shape more square than another?
• Beautiful time-lapse video of Yosemite. The night shots are especially stunning!
• Love it! Remixing Charlotte’s Web with kindergarteners. Change a bit of a story to create something new.
• Building electronics with play-doh! Wish I had an excuse to teach this.
• Great thoughts on truly understanding fraction addition from @dcox21.

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