The rain certainly changed our plans a bit but I’m so glad we made the trip. Thanks to all the parents for the help and ensuring that Roy Gomm’s inaugural field trip to the zoo went so smoothly.

Today we started our newest engineering design challenge. This was the introduction and we worked with different materials to determine what would best protect a fragile package (farfalle pasta). We’ll experiment with different strategies based on a scenario in which students have to engineer “air drop packages” that can be dropped from an aircraft that protects contents and be easy to find, once they hit the ground.
The engineering kit we are working with came from a DonorsChoose project.
We maximized opportunities to work with a lot of content before tracking off for our spring break. We did a “Quiz-Quiz-Trade” around perimeter, read bout Juan Ponce de León and European exploration of North America, used Writable to refine our understanding of introductions, applied for new classroom jobs and introduced the prefix “anit-.” We also completed several Quizizz’s to refine a few skills. All-in-all, really impressive for a day that is traditionally hard to keep kids engaged.
The class was quite fortunate in being selected for a visit by the Sierra Watercolor Society. This is a group that helps students understand watercolor technique and color theory before having the students compose their own watercolor piece. This was a nice experience and it was great that our classroom got to participate.
