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, students designed their own and then wrote a myth to accompany it. The myth needed to somehow form a piece of the mythology of their civilization and reflect something about their civilization's geography, resources, beliefs, etc.

Fruits

Every classic civilization has it's staple food crop. After watching a clip from the intriguing documentary The Fruit Hunters, we decided to make our staples fruits. We got inspiration from the adaptations of real life rare and exotic fruits and created our own. To call our fruits "exotic" would be a huge understatement!

Next up is the culmination of our civilization project in the form of a dynamic, reader-interactive story using the online site http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/. Watch for those stories to be posted before the end of the year.

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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 more beautiful and attractive. We decided to put ourselves to the test--could we be ancient Greek supermodels? First, we practiced measuring and calculating on a scale drawing of a real Greek sculpture that was designed with the golden ratio. Then, with the help of partners, we measured the dimensions of our own facial features and made several calculations. Let's just say there are few potential Ancient Greek Idols in our midst!

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January Update: A Busy Month Culminates in Applied Technology

I found myself with access to a stack of iPads this week and couldn't let the opportunity pass. I quickly updated my plans to incorporate a technology piece that was a perfect extension of the work and explorations we'd been doing at each grade level. Here, then, is a quick summary by grade level of what our January has been all about and then a note about how we used tech this week to enhance and extend our learning.

1st

We've transitioned into visual/spatial reasoning in January, which is a fancy way of saying we've been developing the problem-solving muscles in our brains that utilize visual information to find logical patterns in forms, shapes, colors, etc. We've used two classic geometrical tools to do this: tangrams and pentominoes. This week with the iPads we focused on 3 nice apps to apply these developing skills: Blockaders, Zentomino HD Lite and Zen HD Lite - Relaxing Tangrams. They are all free, find them for your devices!

Tangrams consist of 7 pieces

Pentominoes consist of 12 pieces of 5 sections each

2nd

2014 has been all about roller coasters! We started with some of the basic science, like how coasters get their speed and what "G force" is. Then we went into research mode and dug up some detailed information on famous coasters throughout the world. On the iPads this week, we found the perfect app to begin testing our own coaster engineering skills: Coaster Frenzy. Students have to design, test, and modify their track in order to increase speed and make the ride fun. There is also a wonderful creative aspect to designing a coaster that would be safe AND fun.

3rd

Using Benjamin Franklin's fascination with magic squares as a trigger, we've been playing around with "magic math," especially different types of magic squares. That led us over to a cousin of the magic square, sudoku, and all 3rd graders have now been formally introduced to that classic (and addictive) game. The apps we used this week were ProMagic Square and Sudoku 2. There are probably several thousand sudoku games out there, but this one was a hit for its easy interface.

4th

Well, pentominoes and more pentominoes! As you know, students created 3-D pentominoes at home using 5 6x6x6 inch cubes. We are using those in class for real-life architecture challenges, like the reading nooks we have lovingly called "pentominooks." This week with the iPads we stuck on the theme of pentominoes but with a special creative twist: students used the app iMovie to create movie trailers in which the characters, theme and title all centered around pentominoes in some way. I will share those soon in a separate post.

5th

OK, 5th is the one grade that didn't indulge much in the iPads. We've been busy, though. In January we kicked off a long-term unit on Mindset--a way of framing and perceiving the world and yourself for long-term success and growth. At the same time, we are continuing with our civilization projects. Most recently, students designed (with elaborate detail) the fictional fruits that are the basis of their civilizations. We got some inspiration for our fruit creations from a documentary called Fruit Hunters. We only saw the trailer in class, but Mr. Koch has seen the whole thing and recommends it (Netflix)! :)

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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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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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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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5th Grade: To Boldly Go...

The encounter of civilizations is our driving theme in 5th grade this year. To start generating a list of the attributes of civilizations and also to explore what kinds of consequences arise out of two civilizations encountering each other, we read the book Encounter by Jane Yolen:

Next, to extrapolate this concept of an encounter and put our own current civilization into the story, students created comics that imagined the first contact between modern humans and an "alien civilization." Yes, they have been a lot of fun, but creating them also forced us to reflect on the basic attributes of civilizations (i.e. government, economy, currency, clothing, language, number system, holidays, norms, etc.).

Then we read the story of a boy who was so fed up with his own civilization, who felt so left out and unrecognized, that he literally invented his own from the ground up. Meet Weslandia:

With Weslandia as our inspiration, we've now begun the gradual process of designing our own civilizations. We are starting with Math, or course! OK, it wouldn't have been everyone's choice, but you have to start somewhere. So far, we've studied the number systems of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans and Greeks. We'll also study some more modern systems, like binary, before we start creating our own number systems.

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3rd Grade Update: A Shocking Discovery!

In third grade we have the fortune of studying one of the most fascinating people in American history--Benjamin Franklin. Rather than a traditional biography study, though, we jumped right in with a survey of many of his incredible inventions and how they led to modern manifestations. For example, did you know that Benjamin Franklin invented the first odometer to track the mileage he put on his horse buggy when he was the post man of Philadelphia?

Then we honed in his most iconic discovery and the famous kite experiment. After studying the historical context and relevance of the experiment, we decided to build our own kites! A couple students have already finished. The rest will be finished up next week.

Parents, we will NOT be flying these in a lightning storm!

It was important for students to clarify that Franklin did not "discover" electricity. He proved that lightning was a form of electricity. That allowed him to then think about controlling it in order to protect tall buildings, and that is how the lightning rod was born.

As part of our literature connection, we are also reading the rather revealing alternative history of Benjamin Franklin's life as told by his mouse Amos in the book, Ben and Me by Robert Lawson. Turns out there's more to the story than anyone knew!

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