That's a Good Question?

Young children are naturally curious and ask tons of questions. I can remember wondering if my son would ever tire of asking, "Why?" As students enter school the balance of who asks the questions shifts. Students do the bulk of the answering and ask very few questions. This presents a problem when we want students to explore open ended topics and invent and reiterate their creations. All of this starts with a question that is student centered. As I have watched students in our summer program and in STEM lessons, some of them struggle to engage because they have trouble forming a question. Their curiosity is no longer natural.
To help students develop their questioning skills and to recognize the need for a questions, we focused on questions. Here's a sample our efforts. I've edited some for clarity.

How do you make an experiment?

How to you make stuff with Legos?

Can we build 3 houses out of cardboard?

How many blocks are in the Lego apartment?

How big can we make something out of cardboard?

How big is our tower going to be?

Can you make a Rubix Cube out of cardboard?

How do I program sensors?

How do you program the robot to move forward?

How do I make a surprise for the teachers?

This week I was encouraged when two students asked to use a Chromebook. I asked them why they needed it. They replied that they wanted to look up how to make a paper airplane. Not only did they have a question they had moved on to looking for the answer on their own. Student ownership of learning!!!

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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

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