Monday - Thursday
- small groups met to explore and discover electricity and building circuits after learning that Steve Jobs used circuit boards to construct computers ;)
- hands-on minds-on approach that led them to test, hypothesize, retest, change variables, etc. as they constructed their own meaning of circuits
Below is a very special photo designed for the small groups that incorporates what I just taught myself on Thursday for our special biographies book - inspired by William Joyce. Before even using the language of the discipline of science, we analyzed and discussed what we observed, predicted, and hypothesized based on these images printed onto a photograph. Only your child will know why it is soooo special. :) Your child might even be able to teach you.
Friday
- big buddies came to construct meaning of circuits with us (We had more experience than them at that point, so it was planned for our students to guide the fifth graders in the discovery process. Beautiful!!!)
- fifth grade buddy class trusted us with their sets of Snap Circuits (We were lucky to have one fabulous Snap Circuit set we were using all week from a parent :). Our buddy class teacher is my friend and her husband is a high school physics teacher with many supplies. :) Yes, that was correct - high school supplies. We might write to the company telling them to change their age rating from 8-108 to 6-108 as we think they underestimate our potential. :) )
Best part of all -
All children were given the chance to watch The Polar Express in the media center (1 hour 40 minutes which I didn't know until Thursday night :0) or stay in our room to do STEAM stations or iPads. Any guess what the breakdown was out of 23 students at school?
2 - students went to watch the movie
5 - played anything of choice on iPads
16 - literally grabbed the circuit sets and spent the ENTIRE time testing different ways to build circuits!!!
Can you guess how exciting that is to a teacher who loves math and science? :)
Many photos were taken of the small groups, buddy exploration (1 hour 15 minutes), and circuits by choice at the end of the day (about an hour). A few are shown below, but a slideshow is being constructed for most. Watch for the slideshow in the next day or two. :)
A fantastic site (again underestimated by the creators about recommended age ;) ) is embedded above this post. When clicking, it will download a simulation site (not space consuming) from a Physics site created by the University of Colorado that we saw demonstrated on Friday. It's very fun and mimics what we did in real life fairly well. Your child CAN and WILL understand and learn from it. Hint: Try the "Grab Bag" at the top and tell them to connect it to our small group augmented reality photo. Warning: it requires Flash which does not play on iPads.
Thank you to Liam's mom for teaching us about how police officers dust for prints, identify prints, and how we can identify the type of fingerprints we have. The children were fascinated by the entire process. Who knows? We might have some future detectives in our room. :)
Thank you to all of the parents who made our cookie party possible. They loved it!
Thank you all for your trust, continued support, and generosity! The children are learning at a very advanced and accelerated pace out of sheer love of learning through discovery and exploration.
Our last week before break in photos . . .
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