Short and Full Week of Learning

Boats, coding, robotic friends and circuits made learning fun on our short, second week of the summer program. Independence Day made for a short week of the summer program but we were still plenty busy. We designed and tested aluminum foil boats on Monday. We started testing the capacity of the boats with pennies and quickly ran out of pennies. We then used plastic sea creatures from our math curriculum. The record was 146 sea creatures in one boat!

Our school has just been named as a STEM Transformation School by our school district. As part of our STEM transformation we will be expanding our implementation of Project Lead the Way curriculum. Projects like building simple boats from foil have helped to introduce the engineering design process to our students. Our kindergarten and fourth grade students experienced Project Lead the Way this past school year and we are excited to expand to all of our classrooms next school year.

We continued our week with some coding using Scratch Jr. on the iPads. Students were challenged to make their character appear and disappear and even dance.

We used lessons from Thinkersmith to learn circuits and programming. Students programmed their Robotic Friends to stack cup formations. What seemed like such a simple task proved to be far more complicated than they thought. We finished the week with another Thinkersmith activity, Traveling circuits. The students were fascinated by taking apart a simple LED tea light and then trying to make a new circuit. They were excited to take home the circuits to show their families what they had learned!

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Ollies and Math

Thanks to generosity of Chevron through Donors Choose , my math class experienced a new mobile technology, Ollies! Ollies are programmable robots made by Sphero . We used the app, Macrolab to program the Ollies. I modified a lesson from the Sphero website to teach the concepts of measurement and data. The first day, we explored how to program the Ollies and how changing the variables in the program affected what Ollie did. The students recorded data to capture what they were seeing. On day 2 it was time to be more methodical with our data collection. Students only changed one variable at a time. This allowed students to discover the relationship between time and the distance that the Ollie traveled. The students changed the variable of the delay between the roll and stop commands to develop this understanding. There was definitely a lot of excitement and motivation to learn measurement. On Day 3, we analyzed the data recorded from each group. There were some noticeable differences

Roller Coasters

The students chose words to describe roller coasters. We recorded them using Answer Garden . I think it also describes what building roller coasters is like. There was a buzz of excitement as groups of students designed and constructed marble roller coasters. One of the student remarked, "This doesn't look like regular library time." He had just asked me if he could tape the roller coaster ramp to the wall and was shocked when I said, "Of course." The students were so engaged with their projects that they did not notice a visitor from the Hillsboro Tribune . Kathy Fuller came to learn about what was happening in our building this summer. We are proud that we will be featured in the newspaper. I will make sure to include the link in a future post. We will be continuing our roller coaster construction tomorrow. I am very thankful that our custodial staff is supportive of these messy projects. This video captures the feelings expressed in the wordl

Halfway

I am taking it as a positive sign that we are halfway through our summer program and there is still tons of positive energy. Mrs. Gonzalez and Ms. Ayala's phone calls resulted in 5 new students today! We are expecting even more new students on Monday. My hope is that we can bring the average daily attendance to 40 students. This article affirmed our purpose for the summer program and pushing the students to work on their math skills in addition to reading. http://www.vox.com/2014/7/13/5891583/summer-slide-achievement-gap-vacation I am looking forward to comparing their end of the year MobyMax math placement with their beginning of the year placement test score. Plans for next week... Model canoes, gardening, writing a Scratch character description and an art project

On the move

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