Student Challenge: Boy and Girl

A boy and a girl sit next to each other in class. "I am a boy," says the child with blue eyes. "I am a girl," says the child with brown eyes. Their teacher knows that at least one of them is lying. Which is the boy and which is the girl?

For a blog point, place your answer in a closed envelope addressed to "Mr. Koch." Put your name and grade as the return address. Deliver it to Mr. Koch at school.

p.s. If you can't find me, your teacher can put it in my mailbox too!
p.p.s. You can add comments, but DON'T reveal your answer in the comments!

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Word of the Week: "brouhaha"

To earn a "blog point," study the word below, then add a comment and use the word in a sentence. You must use correct punctuation, capitalization and the word must be used correctly. A funny sentence is OK as long as it makes sense and is rated PG!

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1st Grade Update: Stop Motion Movies

Our research on Thomas Edison led us into the fascinating world of early animation and some of the tools early animators used to create the illusion of movement and hence, "motion pictures." One of these early tools that Edison himself was inspired by was the thaumatrope. In a previous post, you can see that we made our own thaumatropes. 

A more advanced early animation and motion picture tool was the kinetescope. It passed a series of still pictures through a view finder and gave the illusion of a movie to those who watched. We learned that the more still pictures (frames) you pass per second, the more smooth and realistic the movie is.

We applied this same concept but with help from a little modern technology. The LEGO Movie app allows you to create stop motion animation in much the same way these early machines did. It was tough to learn from all of our mistakes in just one hour, but I was very impressed with what the students created in such a limited time! Their videos are below:

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Student Challenge: Add a Line

By adding one straight line, can you make the following equation add up?

5 + 5 + 5 = 5 5 0

For a blog point, place your answer in a closed envelope addressed to "Mr. Koch" and with your name and grade as the return address. Deliver it to Mr. Koch at school.

p.s. If you can't find me, your teacher can put it in my mailbox too!
p.p.s. You can add comments, but DON'T reveal your answer in the comments!

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Student Challenge: Relatives

Riddle: Brothers and sisters I have none but this man's father is my father's son.Who is the man?

For a blog point, place your answer in a closed envelope addressed to "Mr. Koch." Put your name and grade as the return address. Deliver it to Mr. Koch at school.

p.s. If you can't find me, your teacher can put it in my mailbox too!
p.p.s. You can add comments, but DON'T reveal your answer in the comments!

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Word of the Week: "bedlam"

To earn a "blog point," study the word below, then add a comment and use the word in a sentence. You must use correct punctuation, capitalization and the word must be used correctly. A funny sentence is OK as long as it makes sense and is rated PG!

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Student Challenge: Sunbathing Sea Lions

Some sea lions are lying in the sun on two rocks in the harbor. The sea lions on the larger rock shout over to the sea lions on the smaller rock: "If one of you comes over here, there will be twice as many sea lions in our group as in yours." The sea lions on the smaller rock reply: "Well, if one of you comes over here, our numbers will be equal."

How many sea lions are there on each rock?

For a blog point, place your answer in a closed envelope addressed to "Mr. Koch." Put your name and grade as the return address. Deliver it to Mr. Koch at school. 

p.s. If you can't find me, your teacher can put it in my mailbox too!
p.p.s. You can add comments, but DON'T leave your answer in the comments!

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5th Grade Update: Creating New Civilizations

There isn't anything too flashy to share for 5th grade, but we've been doing a LOT of ground work in terms of research and idea building for our civilization projects. After our research of various number systems from civilizations throughout history, students have begun designing their own number systems. Will it be a base 10? Base 5? Base 20? How many digits/numerals will it use? Ten like the Hindu-Arabic system we use today? How will you represent large numbers? With a place value system? With a coded way of putting the numerals in a specific order? There are MANY questions and considerations!

Aside from number systems, we've also researched the overall makeup of civilizations, such as geography, economy, government, clothing, natural resources, diet, entertainment, education and so on. Our goal is to take the best and the interesting and the successful from these classic civilizations and adapt them to our own as we create them.

Building background with civilization research

Studying the complexities of the Roman Numeral System

In addition to our civilization project, we've been toning, reviewing and practicing some important thinking skills, including logical reasoning, analogies, and practice with the Six Thinking Hats.

 

If you are not familiar with Six Thinking Hats, here is an excellent article to give you some background.

These are all ways of getting our 5th graders ready for the intense and challenging leap into Middle School academics. Another key component I will be implementing right here on the blog is our Word of the Week challenge. Just look for posts with the title or tag "Word of the Week" and have students review the word and its definition. Then, they add a comment using that word in a sentence to earn "blog points." These blog points will be redeemed later. : )

Last, but not least, nearly every 5th grader has now finished his comic on "Encounters." They make for a colorful and entertaining wall. Visitors to the room are always immediately drawn to them, and often get "stuck" in that part of the room as they try to read them! 

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4th Grade Update: Blueprints In Progress

The mysteries of The Wright 3 continue to deepen as our 3 main characters are gradually unraveling the strange but true history of the Robie House in Chicago. Along the way, though, we let the book send us off on related thinking challenges and projects, and one of those projects is to slowly design our own homes. Little by little we've learned some basic concepts of architecture and also focused on the Math that architects use. We've created a basic layout for our homes designed to suit a family of 5, and then drawn a scaled version of the home (1 inch = 5 feet) aiming for a perimeter of about 200 ft. We've also learned about the aesthetics of a "facade" and explored using repeated elements to create a visual pattern that is pleasing to the eye.

Blueprints in progress

Calculating perimeter

Repeating elements to create a pattern on this "facade"

We've also pulled out the 3-D pentominoes in order to follow the thinking of one of our main characters in The Wright 3. We try to model his constructions, but also explore by making our own.

Here's some of the art glass in the Robie House

One of the most beautiful traits of the Robie House are the art glass windows designed by Frank Lloyd Wright himself. When I came across some old "transparency sheets," the perfect project idea came to mind. "Let's make our own art glass windows!" It was also a nice moment to discuss the "ancient classroom technology" of overhead projectors and transparencies. We mimicked Wright's designs but gave them our own unique flair of personality, first on graph paper and then transferred onto the transparencies. They look A LOT better on a sunny day, but the pictures below should give you an idea...

We've also taken time these last few weeks to review/practice our deductive reasoning skills with the help of logic grids. If you've seen our younger grade updates you'll see they've been practicing as well. We never stop doing them--they just get more and more complex!

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3rd Grade Update: Hot Off the Presses!

Though it took some patience and some skilled hands, everyone has finished their kites! The back of each kite includes an executive summary of the famous event, including the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW of it all. Many have keys attached, and one student even brought in a mock Leyden jar just like the one Ben used to "trap" his electricity.

After the "enlightening" experience of the kite projects, we did go back into Ben's childhood and do a more traditional biography study.

We've studied his life so far right up to about his 40s, when he really made his mark as a printer of two major publications: 1) The Philadelphia Gazette newspaper and 2) Poor Richard's Almanac. Both had a major impact on the thinking and development of society in Ben's times and the sayings and wisdom of "Poor Richard" are still well-known today. We spent some time unpacking and decoding several of Poor Richard's gems, such as:

• Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.
• He that can have Patience, can have what he will.
• Diligence is the Mother of Good-Luck.
• Hear no ill of a Friend, nor speak any of an Enemy.
• A true Friend is the best Possession.

For the last few weeks we've been trying our own hand at publishing, working on a newspaper project in the computer lab. Each student is putting together a newspaper edition inspired by Ben Franklin with the following requirements:

• One funny article about life at your school written with a pseudonym (Like Silence Dogood!)
• One article with advice for other students
• A newspaper cartoon (you can copy from the internet but make sure you say where you got it)
• Three jokes and/or riddles throughout the paper
• An Almanac Page with:

1. Weather predictions
2. Wise sayings

We've also taken some time the last couple weeks to introduce/review some specialized deductive reasoning skills with logic grids. Some kids love them, some kids dread them. Either way, logical reasoning is an important piece of their thinking tool kit!

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2nd Grade Update: There's a SPRING in Our Step

You know from our last update post that we'd had the LEGOs out to do some attribute sorting and a creative design challenge. Well, we weren't quite ready to put them away so we constructed a little research unit on the history of LEGO. We used the book LEGO Toys by Kris Hirschmann as well as the video below as our primary sources and created research mindmaps.

We then switched gears and focused on another classic toy--the pull back car. In our first lab, we conducted an experiment to see if the distance we pulled them back had a direct relationship with how far they went. Our hypotheses was yes! As a secondary experiment, we also compared the data between the car running on the table vs. carpet.

The next major questions was: Where is the energy coming from to make these simple toy cars move? There was only one way to find out--we dissected them!

The great discovery of our dissection was a very special machine--the spring! So THAT sent us on another research exploration, this time to gather more information about springs.

And springs are where we currently stand. This will lead us into an exploration of potential vs. kinetic energy and to the creation of a very special Thanksgiving-themed project. Stay tuned! : )

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1st Grade Update: From Light Bulbs to Motion Pictures

Since our opening unit on learning styles and multiple intelligences, we've covered LOTS of ground researching Edison and related inventions. 

We started with some traditional research using the text Thomas Edison and the Light Bulb and gathered our data into a class "big book."

One of our major research questions was to discover what material made the best filament inside the light bulb for it to last the longest. Originally, light bulbs used cotton thread for the filament. You can imagine the problem with that. After experimenting with THOUSANDS of different options, the best material Edison found for a long-lasting bulb was bamboo! Today, tungsten is the most favored material for a filament in a traditional light bulb.

We balanced out the analytical thinking required for our research with a creative challenge: design a light bulb of the future using LEGO pieces!

Next, we applied our growing knowledge of light bulbs by using the classic picture book The Important Book as a model to create our own "important pages" about the light bulb. We also illustrated and diagrammed the major parts of the light bulb to go along with it.

Then it was time to move beyond the light bulb and look at another project that Edison played a role in: the motion picture (AKA the movies!). We discussed the concept of persistence of vision that early animators used to explain how a series of still images could seem to move. Edison was fascinated during his life with one particular, very simple animation device called a thaumatrope. Here's a video with the instructions we used to make our own. The students learned by trial and error which methods worked best and created some very fun, animated scenes! 

Our next step is to take a technological leap but use the same basic methods to create a more complex movie. We'll be using a stop-motion movie maker app on the ipads. Our next update should be some movies for you to watch!

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Article: Can Emotional Intelligence be Taught?

Recently at our GT parent meeting, I stressed the importance of addressing the "affective" or "social/emotional" aspect of growing up gifted. This New York Times article discusses some of the current, ongoing research on the topic. Here are a couple excerpts from the article that might entice you to read more:

"...school is an emotional cauldron  a constant stream of academic and social challenges that can generate feelings ranging from loneliness to euphoria. Educators and parents have long assumed that a child’s ability to cope with such stresses is either innate — a matter of temperament — or else acquired “along the way,” in the rough and tumble of ordinary interaction. But in practice, Brackett says, many children never develop those crucial skills."

"So-called noncognitive skills — attributes like self-restraint, persistence and self-awareness — might actually be better predictors of a person’s life trajectory than standard academic measures. A 2011 study using data collected on 17,000 British infants followed over 50 years found that a child’s level of mental well-being correlated strongly with future success."

Here is the URL to the article in case you have trouble with the link above: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/can-emotional-intelligence-be-taught.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=magazine

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