Terrific Week Ten

This week the lab hosted: Ms. Hernandez's Kindergarten, Ms. Thormodsgaard's 1st grade, Ms. Massey's 2nd grade, Ms. Noell's 3rd grade, Ms. Aguilera's 4th grade, & Ms. Limon's 5th grade.
We had a week punctuated with special events and outstanding class achievements! Monday we kicked off Red Ribbon Week with the creation of a 26 foot long ribbon made from the individual Drug-Free pledges of every student in the school. The massive ribbon was looped into the traditional symbol and hung from the top level of the main hallway. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade all had field trips and several classes joined to ranks of Marathon Kids Champs by completing their first 26.2 miles!
STEMlab wk10 from Kimberly Boyce-Quentin on Vimeo.

Kinder Eco-School Green Heroes did Campus Clean-Up twice this week! I am so impressed with their leadership and commitment to being good campus citizens! Ms. Hernandez's class was able to execute the anti-litter poster designed by Ms. Bell's class from materials picked up outside by Ms. Colmenero's class! SYNERGY in action! In Code.org they made tremendous progress with several students getting all the way to Stage 8!
Ms. Thormodsgaard's 1st grade is almost finished with their Code.org class! Several students had advanced far enough to begin programming the Bee Bots! The G/T students from this class started research on their topic - ramps! They finished the vocabulary and are going to conduct their experiments early next week.
Ms. Massey's class were the Eco-Schools Recycling Green Heroes this week and can report that the classes do better and better at filling the bins with recyclable material only! They were introduced to Scratch coding language and began working their way through the built-in activities. The had a fantastic trip back to the 1860's at George Ranch mid-week as well!
Ms. Noell's 3rd graders have finished exactly 1/2 of Code.org Course 2 at this point! Students who had completed the most lessons took a break to begin learning to program the OZOBOTS. Mr. Briceno's G/T students stopped by to show their progress on their Mini Science Fair projects. I can assure everyone that these are going to be the stars of the show! They have done a fantastic job!
Ms. Aguilera's 4th graders created their Scratch online accounts and started to familiarize themselves with the various blocks and features. They love it! I cannot wait to see what they will create in their next visit to the STEM lab. They are also only a couple of laps from finishing their 1st marathon!
Ms. Limon's class did take a day from their lab time to finish their marathon and have already collected a couple of miles towards Marathon 2! They spent the bulk of their lab time this week working through puzzles in Code.org Course 3 and planning their interactive projects for next rotation.
All in all a very productive week! Can't wait to see what the students do next week!