What's New By Grade Level

Students are learning to work interdependently in STREAM 1! This means that many of our projects and activities have had a focus on teamwork and collaboration. Kindergarten listened to the story Bonaparte Falls Apart by Margery Cuyler. In the story Bonaparte’s friends help him to solve a problem. His friends come up with many different ideas to help find a solution. Not all of the ideas work. We learned that it is important to try many ideas when attempting to solve a problem. Kindergarten also learned about symmetry and created their own symmetrical skeletons using playdoh and Q-Tips! First and Second Grade students read the book Press Here by Herve Tullet. This surprising book helped students to explore the concepts of action and reaction. We learned that where there are a series of actions and reactions, we have a chain reaction. Students then used basic classroom materials to create their own series of chain reactions! Third and Fourth Grade students participated in a STEM Quest Escape Room Challenge. They worked in teams to solve a variety of standards based challenges in math & language arts. They proved to be *SMARTIES* as all four classes were able to complete the quest! Fifth Grade students practiced their collaboration skills as well as their use of the engineering and design process in the newspaper basketball tower challenge. Students worked in teams to create a tower using only newspaper and masking tape that would hold the weight of a basketball. The tower must be stable and a height of at least 12 inches. All teams were successful and many teams challenged themselves beyond the 12 inch requirement reaching heights of 20 inches and beyond! Sixth, Seventh and Eighth grade students had to use collaboration and were required to think outside the box in the nail balance challenge. Students were challenged to see how many nails they could balance on the head of one nail. The nails could touch each other but no part of the wood block. Many students hypothesized that the teams would only be able to balance one or two nails. In the end, many groups were successful in balancing between 12 and 32 nails!! In between our larger group activities the students have been participating in smaller challenges that focus on a specific Habit of Mind. Classrooms have begun sharing their knowledge and expertise on these Habits of Mind. Look for the student created posters that will begin to be displayed in the hallway across from the office!