I would like to express a HUGE thank you to for families that helped out or contributed to Teacher Appreciation Week this year. It was a fun theme, and our staff got spoiled rotten! Thank you for the food and gifts! Hopefully you all got the email too regarding the GT parent survey. Your feedback will be helpful for us to continue to define how we meet the needs of students like yours at Werner. Take a moment to fill it out by June 3, please. Click on the link below: http://goo.gl/forms/YyqW7zaQzJ_ We had our last STEM Engineering challenge at the end of last week, and I had a chance to put the pictures together into a movie. I'll share those now in this week's edition of Three for Thursday. And again I want to thank Toshiba and our local Rotary club for providing the funds that made all of this year's challenges possible through their grant funding. Based on the feedback I have gotten from students so far, these days were probably their favorite activities we did all year. All of the pictures are also on the photos page of the website too: http://traceybean.weebly.com/photos.html The fourth grade challenge last week was to take their moon rover they had built during the March challenge, put their egg-stronaut inside and now build a moon lander to hold everything and survive the drop/landing on the lunar surface. Here is the video of their results: Third grade took on the challenge of building a tower out of lightweight materials that could be constructed on the moon or a distant planet that would be able to hold a transponder to communicate with Earth if necessary. This continued their look into how might we create back-up plans and increase safety for our space explorers through all of their challenges this year. Some of the third grade classes had done a similar challenge at the beginning of the year so this was a chance to use more materials and build on what they learned through their earlier experiences. Fifth grade has had such a busy schedule with testing and getting ready for middle school that their challenge was a one-day event this time. That didn't stop them from being successful in planning, building and testing in a short time-frame though. They were building magnetometers that might be placed in deep-space crafts that need to explore planets to help determine their make-up. NASA, in fact, does use magnets to pass over the planets surfaces. The presence of a magnetic field helps them determine the make-up of the core of the planet. In our case, the students were using grids on the top of our "planet surfaces" where magnets were hidden. Their devices then used metal shavings to determine where the magnets were hidden. Here is the video showing their work:
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I apologize for not blogging last week, but I was at Covenant Heights (freezing!) with the 5th graders at their Eco Adventure. We had a great time despite the snow and cold. My pink group had a fabulous time on the zip line and high adventure. And our girls cabin had fun playing games and singing songs. All of the pictures I took are on the photos link on this website. http://traceybean.weebly.com/photos.html Here are a few samples of some of the evidence of fun! Last night, I had the privilege of taking 10 of our top performing problem solvers to the Poudre School District Mighty Math Minds Tournament at Olander Elementary. Sierra, Dylan, Lydia, Sophie, Nick D, Jensen, Bryn, Quinn, Alex, and Sammi represented us, and they did awesome! Out of the 39 teams from the district, our teams placed 4th and 17th. And the most important part was they had fun doing math! Again take a peek at the photos page http://traceybean.weebly.com/photos.html _to see all of the pictures but here are a couple of shots of the teams: And the last update for this week are some pictures from our last STEM Engineering challenges for the year. 5th grade built magnetic detection devices that could be included in deep space exploration of remote planets. 4th graders built moon landers to hold their moon rovers from the last challenge. They also had to hold their egg-stronauts, and survive the landing unharmed (uncracked!) 3rd graders are building transponder towers that could aid communications from the moon or another planet in case of emergency. Once all groups have finished their challenges, I'll post the pictures and videos next week. |
Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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