Nov 2 - Back to Building

Phew! What a day! I don't know how the kids are feeling tonight, but I'm exhausted from SUCCESSFULLY building the base of our tree fort. More on that later. Before building, we read a couple pages about the tough duties our first presidents encountered given their responsibility of building a new nation. At the top of this list was stabilizing the economy after the revolution, creating effective self-defense, and establishing a peaceful political system in a time when most citizens opposed a centralized government and favored stronger state governments.

We practiced some highlighting and summarizing techniques while we read. The last point of the reading explained how the tradition of peacefully transferring power from one president to the next originated after the heated and nasty race between Jefferson and Adams, but ended with Adams retreating respectfully when Jefferson won, and the people accepted the results as well. This is an issue that has been raised in the current presidential race, which we briefly discussed.

Take one: attempting to reposition a pre-assembled brace, requiring us to lift a very large and awkward but over a tall tree branch. The result? Success, with major failure right after. Failure rules!

From her helpful perch, Soleil was able to explain that our (2nd? 3rd?) failure of the morning was like the game we play called Minefield. In the game, individuals have to attempt to choose the correct path forward on a grid without touching the unknown mines. It requires lots of failure, iteration, and communication to finally succeed, just like our building project. We took a break for lunch and play - all of us frustrated and a bit discouraged for the time being. Turns out, building a level structure on a very steep and muddy hill is hard. Have a written that before?

With a new strategy, a major pep talk, and assigned roles, we got back to work and started building momentum.

And before we knew it, the sides started coming together.