17-18 week 25

A great week for Green STEM!

PPES STEM lab 1718 wk 25 from Boyce Teacher on Vimeo.

Our Arts Access Initiative partnerships continue to be an incredible asset to our students! This week we were thrilled to have Da Camera back in Ms. Leal’s class for their Landfill Harmonic Music Encounter and have Ms. Jean Kuecher back for a marionette performance of Sleeping Beauty and the Handsome Prince.

Scenes from Landfill Harmonic HERE

Scenes for Sleeping Beauty HERE

Well, as an Eco-Schools USA Green Flag campus, every week is a good week for Green STEM, but the beautiful weather let us get lots of habitat and campus improvement work done! We were so worried after the bizarre weather this winter featuring two multi-day hard freezes, but our gardens are bouncing back with less loss than feared! We have used Monarch Money and some very generous sponsorship from Ms. Leal to complete 3 beds, add a new garden expansion, and fill in some soil loss! Two new classroom gardens were added as well – one for Ms. Brown and another for Ms. Leal! Funds have been donated to install 3 more gardens next week!

3rd grade started work on their Earth Day art project and materials arrived for 2^nd grade to get to work next week!

Robots we key to turning STEM to STEAM this week! Lower grades designed and created their own Bee Bot mats for the little robots to navigate. They love programming these and make the connection from their Code.org programming exercises very easily! The upper grades used Sphero to paint. They created a spectacular gallery of gorgeous robot action painting!

Students also were introduced to a range of OSMO activities! Tangrams, Numbers, Words, and coding with Awbie were big hits this week.

Everyone continues to make progress in their Code.org courses!

4^th and 5^th grade set up their own personal BrainPOP accounts to better manage their own learning. Students quickly mastered the basics of new tools – Make-a-Map, Make-a- Movie, Sortify, and Snap Thoughts for Game Up. They build personalized reviews for their STAAR practice tests this week! Way to own your learning, Panthers!