We are deep into our roller coaster challenges. Students had limited supplies and had to make their “track” complete one task. Some appeared to be easy – make the marble run out of kinetic energy – others too a bit more thinking to accomplish – make the marble complete a loop. Here are some pictures as we work through the challenges. Especially the challenge of taping the track to the floor!
Building flexible thinking is an important part of our STEAM learning.. Today in Math we practiced looking at numbers in different ways. Here you can see the children showing all the different ways they can see a number. We all looked at the same number – 3,698 – and listed the different ways we could create one part of that number. Then we did a gallery walk to see each others’ work and share compliments on their creative thinking. We also looked for any inconsistencies we might have noticed. There are quite a few really interesting thoughts shared in the pictures!
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When my class was doing multiplication we did something fun, Ms.Concepcion said to write on our desks and I was like “what?”. She showed us how to write the question on our desks, it was quite fun when we got the hang of it! The first question was 42 x 12 and I realized it was box method when I got in to it so it actually was real easy! 😀
Grade 4 presented at their first assembly of the 2019-2020 school year. Here are a few more pictures of our Rube Goldberg machines. After our first designs and build testing, we had to come back to the drawing board and make some adjustments (or out right changes) to our designs. It was a great opportunity for the students to learn that Science and Engineering is about making a plan, seeing what works and -more importantly- seeing what does not work. That is where the learning happens. It was awesome to see how the initial resistance to changing the plan quickly moved into an excited new plan that was more informed AND more successful!
Check out these images of our SECOND planning session that happened after we learned what worked and what we needed to change. These were our final “yellow prints” (as one student renamed our blueprints that were made on yellow paper) that we brought to assembly.
We are doing a math app called Freckle where we get assignments and math problems to solve. We will get placed in a level and then we do math skills based on our level. Another fun thing about Freckle is that we can put clothes on our avatar using the points\piggy coins we earn.
Sometimes we all need a little help waking up in the morning. No Worries!! Grade 4 got a morning jolt today with a little help from GoNoodle. If you haven’t seen it before, GoNoodle is a fun website that helps promote movement in the classroom. It was super fun to do this movement activity with the students!
