What are we working on in....
Kindergarten: Students worked in partners to design a painting tool that would paint thick lines, thin lines, and dots. They had a bag full of different materials such as wooden dowels, chenille stems, foam, sponges, string, pom-poms and styrofoam balls and they had to agree on what to build with their partner, draw it and then build it. then next week, we painted with the tools to see if they did what we wanted them to do!
Building the painting tool
First Grade: First graders were presented with the real world problem of how to build a tool for stranded hikers that used light and sound to communicate. They have been learning about what causes sound and how it travels, as well as how light acts when it shines on different surfaces. They finally started building the rescue tool with their partner and we tested them out to see if they work as well as we want them to. Next, they will have a chance to revise their designs and re-test to make them even better!
Second grade: Students have been learning about properties of matter and states of matter. They have used various materials to build "coolers" to keep an ice pop as frozen as possible while under a heat lamp for 30 minutes. They come up with great ideas as a team! We were even able to build one cooler design, test it and then re-build and modify their original cooler design and re-test with another ice pop to see which design works better!
Third Grade: Students are coding in Scratch, a computer programming platform that uses block coding. They are creating a "Choose-Your- Own-Adventure" program, inspired by the books of that same format. They have been "pair programming" with a partner throughout the unit so that, although they are on the computer, they are talking to a partner about what characters to include, what to make them say, what backgrounds to include, etc... Scratch is an app on their Chromebooks (not connected to the web) --ask them sometime to show you what they have made so far!
An example of the final project in Scratch
Fourth Grade: Students have been learning about energy, energy conversion, and energy transfer. As a school, we have also read The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, the story about William Kamkwamba, a young man in Malawi, Africa who built a windmill out of junkyard scraps to bring electricity and running water to his village. The students combined these two areas of learning when they worked with a small group to build their own windmill with various materials such as cardboard, cardstock, construction paper, VEX construction kit pieces, aluminum foil, chenille stems, bottle caps, etc... They had to make the windmill blades turn when it was put in front of a fan, and we had many successes thanks to their engineering!
Presenting their windmill to the class
Fifth Grade: Students have been learning how to program their robots to move on their own without the use of remote controls. They have learned to use an app called VEXcode IQ, and they have worked in small groups to complete various challenges that develop their programming skills. Students also do a lot of measuring in this unit in order to program the robot to go the distance they need it to move, and they get a lot of experience with getting the degrees of the turns just right so that the robot moves in the correct direction.
