17-18 week 5

Another whirlwind week here in the Panther STEM / STEAM lab!

This week’s STEM stars:

Ms. Guerrero’s Pre-K

Ms. Bell’s Kindergarten

Ms. Keahey’s 2^nd grade

Ms. Accavallo’s 3^rd grade

Ms. Alanis’ 4^th grade

Ms. Moreno’s 5^th grade

Piney Point STEM lab 1718 week 5 from Kimberly Boyce-Quentin on Vimeo.

Our 1^st grade Monarch Heroes bid buen viaje to our ambassador butterflies! They are participating in the Annenberg Foundation’s Journey North symbolic migration. Each student created a paper butterfly that will spend the winter with a school child from Angangueo, Mexico, near the monarch over-wintering sanctuaries. Click HERE for a slideshow.

K and 1^st were treated to an amazing puppet show, “Favorite Stories” by Jean Kucher via our Arts Access Initiative. It was a huge hit! Scenes from this performance are  HERE.

The George Playhouse from New Jersey thanks to funding from Novo Nordisk created a remarkable musical called Austin the Unstoppable that they are taking to schools around the country. We were thrilled to have this performance promoting healthy living choices! See scenes HERE

Pre-K started a unit about clay, using dough to form letters, numbers, animals, and basic shapes. Their sunflowers continue to make progress outside in the beds as well!

Kinder was introduced to code.org and their beginning computer and programming vocabulary. Ms. Bell’s class also had their first campus clean-up day! Go Green Heroes!

2^nd grade created designs for a robot assistant and 3^rd – 5^th followed up Kobi Yamada’s What Do You Do With an Idea by creating Idea Portraits. Next they all got started on their code.org classes. Students are really enjoying the new courses! They like the range of activities – puzzle solving, drawing challenges, game programming – and the characters too! Star Wars, MineCraft, Ice Age, Angry Birds are all very popular!

So much outstanding perseverance and respectful collaboration needed to be acknowledged, so everyone had a Free Build Friday! All building stations were open (unfortunately the robots are not all unpacked yet – next time!), except for the MakerSpace. It was doing duty as a scene and costume shop for 1^st and 2^nd grade classes prepping for next week’s Mini Drama Fair. It was almost more a treat for me than for the students! There was 100% engagement, imaginations soared, creative collaboration abounded, and the room almost sparkled with joy! Everyone was brilliant, inspired, inventive, resourceful, and even more beautiful was the way in which they all supported and validated each other’s work.