Quick note on Math Olympiad for next week, due to the choir field trip, I have moved the Math Olympiad contest to Wednesday for both 4th and 5th graders. We will participate in contest #2 during our math times on December 16. Please try to make sure your child is at school as they cannot make this contest up when they return to school. 5th grade will also check in on their Stock Market portfolios on that day. As many of you know, I had the opportunity to attend NASA Space Camp for Educator’s thanks to Honeywell last summer. I had so many great ideas for bringing back STEM learning to my classroom. But new ideas usually need a little “seed money” to get them rolling when you work with around 60 students. I applied for and have gotten word that I have received $400 from a grant from Toshiba, who was looking for STEM learning opportunities to invest in this school year. I am so excited that next semester each of my math classes will be doing monthly engineering projects (mostly space related) to learn about collaboration, designing, testing, and redesigning using their creative and mathematical skills. I can’t wait to kick this off. A group of Fossil High School students were also looking for a service project to share their passion for STEM fields so they will also be coming to help. If there are any of you that would want to volunteer time to help or you also have a passion for engineering and the design process, please let me know as I can always use more hands. We will use one Thursday/Friday each month during our regular scheduled math time to do these projects. More info to come… Probably the most fun the kids had all week in my math classes was to participate in the Hour of Code. This is a nationwide movement to get computer programming taught in public schools to all students at all levels for at minimum one hour each school year so that kids can see it isn't too hard and everyone is capable of coding. The kids were able to choose some basic block-programming games to play and learn from. These websites can be found on the Web Resources link on the GT website. They are open sites year round so that your child can get on and learn/play all year (consider this when they are bored over Christmas break!) I have put the links to a couple of the kids’ favorites here in case you too want to try your hand at coding! Also below is a quick video introducing the Hour of Code. Star Wars https://code.org/starwars Minecraft https://code.org/mc Frozen https://studio.code.org/s/frozen
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Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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