What an awesome day today was!! We began our first STEM Engineering Challenge. Actually, I should say what a great week it was! Monday was like Christmas morning as all of the supplies I ordered got delivered and organized. Here are a couple of shots from what my classroom looked like Monday afternoon... Thanks to amazing parent volunteers, excellent teamwork (seriously almost NO scrabbles between teams!) and some perseverance, all three math classes jumped right in to their work. Third grade worked on catapults for pom-poms with the goal of getting shooting your pom-pom as far as possible. Fourth grade built straw rockets with the goal of consistently hitting a target five feet away. Fifth grade is building airbag landers for their rover (EGG!) to land safely from a six foot drop. Keep in mind that they get no instructions on how to accomplish this. The students get the challenge, two teammates, a list of optional supplies (that they must "purchase" with their 200 points,) a poster to brainstorm on and they get to work. Tomorrow we'll finish the design/test/rebuild phase, complete our final tests for the offical points tally, and reflect on their task, as well as their group dynamics. All the pictures I took yesterday are on the photos page of the website so check them out. http://traceybean.weebly.com/photos.html That wasn't the only thing we did all week. Fourth grade math students have been learning about angles all week. We started the week reviewing how to name them (acute, obtuse, reflex...) and mid-week began measuring angles with different types of protractors. For a little bit of fun and exercise, we had a relay race for our review of angle descriptions. Here are a couple of photos from Monday. You can tell by the blurriness how competitive and speedy they were! One of the shifts mathematical learning with the Colorado Standards is that students understand how to use and manipulate number lines. As third grade has been exploring fractions, we have been also making sure to relate fractions to number lines. This last week our focus was on understanding how whole numbers, mixed numbers, and improper fractions (or as I like to call them "fractions greater than 1") all line up on number lines. We had some fun working with partners to create number lines, break them into fractional units, and label them while writing on the table. Something about writing on the table makes any topic more interesting!
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Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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