October 2024

 Students are in the routine of school and are working in groups and partners well! That is a big part of PLTW no matter the grade level. Collaboration and communication are both 21st century skills and we work on them often in class!

Young fives build with new bristle blocks thanks to the generosity of the Bryant/Pattengill PTO!

Young fives are learning about living and non living things and we did some leaf rubbings one day. They turned out great!

Structure and function are a big part of our engineering curriculum and we learned how our skeleton has an important job!

Fun with wikki stix!

...and magnatiles!

Playdough centers tie into our kindergarten engineering unit

1st graders work together in small groups to play an "offline" coding game where they learn how to program a robotic dog! 

Many 5th grade groups are finished with building their robots and are practicing their driving skills and moving blocks with them. This prepares them for a big class competition where students work with other robots to score the most team points in a fun robotics challenge!

building the robot 

Starting the 24-25 School year!

 We have been doing a lot of building and creating since the start of the school year! Kindergarten and young five students have been working with lots of hands on materials at centers! Thank you to the PTO for funds to add some wikki stix, magnatiles, and play dough to our materials collection! Students are loving the creative play! First and second graders have been working in small groups to play an "offline" coding game in order to learn how to program computers! There is a lot of critical thinking, communication, and collaboration happening during this time. They have also started coding in Scratch, Jr.

Fifth graders are working in groups with VEX robotics kits to learn how the electronic components work.

Third graders are working in groups with VEX construction kits to build simple machines. This week they were working on wheel and axles.

Kindergarteners read The 3 Little Pigs and worked with a partner to design and build houses to keep the pigs safe!

5th graders begin building robots.

Wrapping up Learning for the 23-24 School Year!

 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.  

PLTW Spring Learning 2024

 

Kindergartener engineers have been learning about structure and function and then they build a safe house for the three little pigs! We test it out in front of our "Big Bad Fan"! Students get a lot of experience working and communicating with a partner or small group on this task. They also have to think critically and creatively to solve the problem of how to build a strong house with the materials they have!

Testing the houses

Building the Houses

First grade has been learning about how lights and sound work through many hands on activities! Below we see them using string telephones for another example of how vibrations create sound!

First Grade exploring with flashlights

3rd grade has been learning how to program computers in our computer science unit. They have been learning about loops and conditionals in an "offline" coding game where they have to give directions to the robotic dog in the board game to get her home. They get a lot of practice with working with a group, completing their job task, and thinking critically. 

4th grade has been exploring energy with hand crank generators, solar panels, light/energy sticks, playing old fashioned marbles, and many more exploratory activities. There is a lot of looking closely and observing what we see and then recording questions or wonderings we have in order to make sense of all things energy!

5th grade classes have completed their first unit of robotics where they work with a group to build and modify a robot in order to complete a robotics challenge. In the final competition (in the pictures below), they work with another robot group to get the most points possible by moving blocks to their specific color zones and driving on the ramp by the end of the 90 second match! 

3D printed trophies to our winning teams!