SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

This year, Class V will be embarking on a Journey Across the Museum Mile, complete with field trips to museums in our neighborhood. To kick off their adventures, students received and decorated “Journey Journals” which they will take with them on each of their museum field trips. Students visited the first museum on their list last week: the Jewish Museum. Prior to their departure, Class V wrote in their Journey Journals about important journeys they have already taken in their lives and journeys they dream of taking one day. During this class time, students distinguished between physical and metaphorical journeys and discussed how their own experiences along Museum Mile will include both physical and metaphorical learning.

At the Jewish Museum, Class V focused on objects specifically connected to immigration journeys. There, students looked at the Coney Island carousel horses carved by Eastern European master carvers and in front of the display, students read the story Feivel's Flying Horses to learn the story of immigrants who made ritual objects in their homelands and translated their skills to create everyday objects when they moved here, to the United States.

Class V also looked at a collage by multimedia artist Sarah Sze, which to some looked like a literal "sky and a beach" and to others looked like "the idea of getting to a place, which can sometimes feel chaotic," a beautiful metaphor for some people's immigration experiences.

Upon returning to the Schoolhouse, Class V learned how to read an object's tombstone information (label), as well as how to write a line of text about the object, complete with observations (what they saw/noticed about an object) and interpretations (what they think/why it matters).