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Saturday, January 21, 2017

Week 19 Wrap-Up

This week was a wild one! The district was closed in recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Tuesday wasn't feeling up to the challenge of starting off a work week apparently! The flooding and storm conditions meant that Kinder and 1st grade missed an extra day of STEM lab, but they worked twice as hard to get through everything! This week's talented engineers, programmers, and makers came from Ms. Almanza's Kinder, Ms. Martinez's 1st grade, Ms. James' 2nd grade, Ms. Mallona's 3rd grade, Ms. Nelson's 4th grade, and Ms. Purvey's 5th grade.

stem19 from Kimberly Boyce-Quentin on Vimeo.


Kinder and 1st grade are making fantastic progress in Code.org's Course 1! They began programming the BeeBots this week and were quick to point out that it was exactly like programming the bee puzzles in the coding course! Both of these classes earned Free Build Friday!

1st grade G/T students have been hard at work on a series of mini video clip they have filmed as part of the digital tour of our habitats they are presenting at the Digital Mini Fair next week.

Our Eco-Schools Monarch Heroes were showcased in a NWF webinar this week! They have been filming clips for their G/T Expo Digital Mini Fair presentation and are looking forward to a lot of planting in the spring. Our habitats took a big hit during the freeze, but we are ready to work hard and bring them back better than ever!

2nd grade has been working through all the tips lessons in Scratch and making great strides in using the programming language. Many of the class are working on interactive digital MadLibs for the G/T Expo. These projects look great and they are excited to share them with the rest of the school!

3rd grade was very busy programming randomizers in Scratch. These are also for the upcoming Digital Mini Fair. They made physical models of their randomizer (things like dice, color wheels, magic 8 balls, and so on) from reused and recycled materials. Getting the programs to work properly and be truly interactive has been a little challenging, but everyone did very well!

4th grade powered through a huge amount of work! They worked in teams designing and programming their own video games in Scratch for the G/T Expo. They were also busy in the MakerSpace creating game controllers to use with the MakeyMakeys AND completing their cardboard challenge arcade games! They invited Ms. DiPersio's 1st grade class to come for a play day. They were perfect guests and everyone had a wonderful time.

5th grade worked on their Digital Mini Fair projects as well. They wrote "choose your own adventure" style stories and then wrote interactive programs based on them in Scratch. This was a lot of work! Students really saw the design process at work as they had to plan, draft, code, run, review for and correct errors time after time to get everything going smoothly.

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