Announcements: April Calendar

Special Events: Jersey Day!

Nice jerseys, boys and girls! Way to show school spirit!! 

 

Our Current Inquiry: Introducing our Class Bee-Bot!

One of our Minecraft STEM challenges in the past was to program a code for Steve to maneuver his way throughout his world to help him get to the diamonds. We were inspired to learn a little bit more about coding. We were able to purchase a robot for our classroom called a Bee-Bot! It's a cute little robotic bee that you have to program in order for it to move. It teaches skills like problem solving, directional language, and computational and sequential thinking. Watch us introduce it to the class:

It came with directional cards to help us create the code for the bee-bot to move. We realized afterward that we didn't even need them to help us! It came with a town grid and a deserted island grid. You can even make your own grids, like Minecraft, Shopkins, or math grids. We are so excited to see the opportunities we can have with our class bee-bot!! All students will get a turn to play with it eventually :)

Our Current Inquiry: Time to Mine!

What would an inquiry about Minecraft be if we didn't do some mining!? We wanted to have an opportunity to discover some hidden, precious gems, just like they do in Minecraft :) We decided to make some rocks! We had a great discussion about how rocks are found naturally throughout the world, so these would just be "pretend" rocks :)

We mixed some used coffee grounds, flour, salt, and water to make the dough! We baked them for a bit, and voila! They turned out great! Now it was time to do some mining! We used our Smartboard to do some research. We learned what types of materials we could find through mining, and we learned that miners don't use their hands to dig through, they use special tools, so we had to, too!

Then it was time to get started!

It was really neat to see the imprint it left inside!

General Happenings: Happy Birthday, Clarissa!

Happy birthday, Clarissa! We hope you had a great day!

Special Events: Making Stone Soup!

This week we've been reading the book Stone Soup. Stone Soup is an old folk story in which hungry people convince the others in the town to each share a small amount of their food to make a meal that everyone enjoys!

Of course we couldn't forget the stone!! It was delicious!