First Grade Crankie: The Moon Jar

 The first grade group wrote a story together about how the moon came to be in the sky. We illustrated it and performed it as a crankie. A crankie is a long, hand-illustrated scroll is wound onto two spools inside a box with a viewing window and turned by hand while a story is told. Check out this video of our crankie:

Kindergarteners Work with Robots

Kindergarteners are using Legos with Edison Robots to do some simple coding. In these pictures, you can see the robots following a line. We used a simple bar code to program the robots.

Fourth Graders Learn to Work in Base-3

 

Some of the fourth graders in Mr. Speno's class and in Anne's class have been learning to work in base-3 by playing games and doing computation. Here's what one student wrote about base-3 and how it compares to the number system that we use, base-10:

There are similarities and differences between the base-10 and the base-3 number systems. Both base-3 and base-10 use the digits 0 through 2. Digits are symbols that represent an amount. In math, they use similar bundling and place value. In both bases, the order of the digits matters. However, there are differences too. Base-10 uses digits 3-9. Base-3 does not. Base-10 bundles in groups of 10. Base-3 bundles in groups of 3. We have ones, tens, hundreds, etc but base-3 has ones, threes, nines, twenty sevens, etc. Base three seems unusual but it's not that different from what we usually use.

Mapping out Bunny's Adventure

Students listened to a story about Bunny and Giraffe playing hide and seek:

Click here to listen to the story.

Then they created maps to show Bunny's journey. Here's an example from a first grader:

Students also had an opportunity to write out Bunny's Adventure:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Grade 4: Robot Hands

Fourth graders are making robot hands at home. Here's a picture of one student's robot hand:

Phill Made a Cardboard Dragon!

Check out this dragon made at home!

Kindergarteners Write Sentences About Animals

This seems like so long ago, but I wanted to share these pictures. The kindergartners learned about oviparous animals (those that lay eggs). Here they are "writing" sentences by arranging words. Their partner got to guess what animal they were talking about.