Bills Bills Bills.

The time has come for us to pass our first nomad money bill, which will be aimed at clarifying what types of things NOMAD students are allowed to buy with their daily earned NOMAD money. We read the bill the Peninsula cohort created. We decided to change ours slightly so we could have the option of buying more types of items. As research, we watched the veto video our Executive branch sent the Peninsula group that lead to changing their first draft thus creating their approved final draft.

We broke into groups to rework the parent survey about spending money and the bill itself.

NOMAD's favorite team challenge game, Minefield, requires kids to communicate with each other about a challenge course that one one student at a time completes in a separate room. They loved this game today, and they made a brilliant visual map to accomplish their goal.

How sweet success felt when we finished!! We spent some time after the game debriefing what worked and what didn't work in terms of our team work, communication, and effectiveness.

After playing in the misting rain for a brief time, we decided to head back inside for our lunch break. The kids had the idea to collaborate on a horror board game and got straight to work delegating tasks and creating.

We dusted off the ol' jigsaw and cut a spinner and a game board out of plywood. Christie made the cuts today; we haven't been safety trained for power tools yet in our new space.

We finished watching the Werner Herzog documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" as part of our study of the history of murals. We admired how the film covered various aspects of Paleolithic culture beyond the paintings themselves. We reflected afterwards on scraps of paper answering the questions: "What does the art in Chauvet cave teach or tell us?" "Why do these caves matter?" and "What is the purpose of a mural?"

Our discussion lead us to exploring the purpose of a mural as described by widewalls.com: "to paint a picture of society, created from stories, values, dreams, change." Using this statement, we walked to a few local murals to see if they depicted some or all of these parts.