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Pride from Hard Work

It is hard to believe that 3 weeks of the summer program have already passed. We are averaging about 30 students in grades 1st through 8th a day. I would love to have more students come but it is also great to spend extra time with the students who do come.
Nothing matches the look of pride on a student's face when they meet or exceed a goal they set. I had the opportunity to see this look of pride multiple times this week. The students took great pride in meeting the challenge of building a newspaper table. There were definitely moments of frustration and a couple even walked away from the project. My oldest students initially gave up when their design could not hold as many books as one of the other tables. I had one of those great teacher moments when they walked back into the room and stated, "we've done some planning and we are ready to try again." They still were not able to build a table better than the one that held 22 books but they impressed themselves with a table that held 13 books.
The students worked on writing about the table building experience today. I started them with a paragraph frame that we filled out together and then they wrote their own paragraphs.  I am proud of perseverance they demonstrated both on the building project and in their writing. All of these responses are typed into the computer program, MobyMax. The younger students receive some support from us but they do a lot of the typing on their own. Here is a sample of what they wrote.

frst we rol the papr den we get tap den wi get cordbrd. 

 I collaborated with my team to design a table made  of newspaper and cardboard. First we rolled the paper into tubes.Then we added tape to make the tubes stand by them selves.When we tested the tabel to see if it could hold a book it did so kept on adding more books until finnaly,The tabel could hold twenty two books .Yes our tabel was successful and it could hold twenty two books.

I  worked  with Avaih and  Sera  to make a table out of newspaper and cortin. First we rollde 8 pesis of newspaper and we tapetde to conekt the  rolls of
newspaper Then we put the top on the table and we put a Book on the top.

I collaborated with my partner to make a newspaper and cardboard table. To start off, we rolled a dozen paper tubes. We made two walls out of tubes with five tubes per wall. These were attached on both short sides of the cardboard by tape. Next we placed a tube attaching the two walls on either side. A tube was placed diagonaly in the rectangle space to act has a truss on both sides. We then slowly started placing books on the table. We got up to seven books before the cardboard tabletop buckled. We planned to replace the tabletop, because there was no damage to the legs, and add a support pole in the middle, but ran out of time.Our design was successful in holding seven books,but when another was added, the tabletop broke.

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