End of Year LEGO Stop-Motion Movies!

Let's face it, when we have two huge bins of LEGO pieces sitting around and access to some cool stop-motion technology, why would we NOT make some awesome stop-motion movies as part of our end-of-year thematic summaries? But here's the thing: Each grade level was tasked with creating a stop-motion movie that related to our theme for the year. So 5th grade, for example, had to make their film relate to "encounters" between two civilizations or...

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5th Grade: Interactive Inklewriter Story Links!

Fifth graders spent all year building up an imaginary civilization attribute by attribute, from geography to mythology, from basic crops to language and number systems. There were thousands of possible ways to wrap up their study, but we went with a free online program called Inklewriter that allows students to create interactive, reader-driven stories. Their task was to create an interactive story full of reader options that told the story and details of their civilization indirectly along the way. I think you'll enjoy! NOTE: Although I guided...

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Kinder Update: A Running Start into Problem Solving and Logic

Although we've only had a couple meetings so far, you can't say our Kinder students haven't already hit the ground running in some important thinking skills. First, we've been introduced to a thinking system developed by Dr. Edward De Bono called "The Six Thinking Hats." It is a system used in schools and in the corporate world for approaching problems. Each of the six hats has a color and represents a different lens through which to view the problem....

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Fifth Grade Update: The Rise of Civilizations

Bit by bit throughout the year we've been inventing and developing our own civilizations by taking inspiration from real civilizations throughout history, both real and fictional.  Most recently we've added two new attributes to our civilizations and both gave the opportunity to also practice our creative thinking skills of FFOE and SCAMPER. Constellations After studying constellations and their associated myths and legends from various cultures,...

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Fourth Grade Update: Setting the Gold Standard

Our study of the novel The Wright Three has sent us on many wonderful tangents this year, but none have been as mathematically mysterious as the Golden Ratio. Used and observed by architects, artists and philosophers throughout history, the Golden Ratio is a number that seems to reflect the universe's natural desire to make things beautiful, or so many believe. The ancient Greeks believed that humans who exhibited the golden ratio were naturally...

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Third Grade Update: A Cameras Handspring!

By the way, "A Cameras Handspring" is an anagram for "Ciphers and Anagrams!" That will make sense in a minute. :) Benjamin Franklin's life of unending fascination and intrigue continues to be the launchpad for us to explore many exciting topics. This semester that topic has been ciphers. Franklin himself used ciphers during the Revolutionary War in his work as a spy. First, we understood that there are two basic TYPES of ciphers: 1) Substitution...

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Second Grade Update: Life's Ups and Downs

This semester has been all about roller coasters! In our last update post we told about some of the coaster research we'd done and how we'd explored some of the science behind coasters. Now, it was time to put all that knowledge into action and build our own mini-coasters. Student groups were given miscellaneous supplies, such as wooden dowels, cardboard, paper cups, construction paper and tape and asked to create a roller coaster for a golf ball....

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