For this lesson, students selected a building they have visited or wanted to visit one day. To do this, they used Google Maps and the Street View. After drawing their building and adding details, they mixed colors to create a mood in the background. This was followed by selecting and applying analogous and complimentary colors for their building.
We continued to explore motion through a series of experiments. Students built wheel-and-axel systems, slopes, and twirly birds. As students did this, they refined their understanding of different forces, developed and tested predictions, and manipulated variables. These important core ideas will be further developed with additional experiences.
This week we began our investigation into motion and matter. During the launch we explored two forces, magnetism and gravity, with a specific emphasis on the terms attract and repel.
Among the investigations was understanding how a magnetic field works. Students manipulated this phenomena with studies around magnets and paperclips. In the coming days, we will participate in an engineer design challenge.
Our last official classroom celebration for the 2019-2020 had students making Valentines boxes before sharing cards and gifts. Love all the variation, although the outcome/goal was the same for all.
For this art lessons, the students completed a series of careful observations of art made by indigenous cultures. They learned that Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest believed an animal could represent a person. In turn, they reviewed images of different animals before selecting one, created multiple quick sketches, painted a full representation, and added textures.
Check out the goals the students set for themselves in 2020.
Students brought in favorite wrapped board games for our holiday gift exchange. There were two twists. The first was that we incorporated the White Elephant idea in which games could be “stolen.” The second was that at the end of the exchange, students taught each other how to play the game they had shared for the exchange.
At the beginning of the week, I reminded the students that we would maximize our instructional time until our Holiday Celebration on Wednesday, at 2:30. That is exactly what they did. We covered a lot with explorations of unit fractions, adaptations, work on syntax, and fluency practice via Readers Theater. We gamified content with Quizizz and built background knowledge with Edpuzzle. We were productive and the kids covered important content. Oh yeah, we were also filmed.
Thank you parents for all of your help in creating a really nice Holiday Celebration for the kids. Things ran really smoothly and it great that the kids will have two terrific keepsakes going forward.
Today we did a little more work with the computer science standards. We used Makey Makeys to help us get ready for Scratch coding. We used Spheros to help reinforce our understanding of block coding.
The Nevada Computer Science standards are relatively new as is having all students take at least a 1/2 credit of computer science when they get to high school. We’ll continue to explore these outcomes to better prepare the students for what is next in their academic careers.
Room 360 