2019-20 STEAM Lab week 19

A fantastic last week of the Year of the Pig!

We started Monday morning with back-to-back performances of the Alley Theatre’s Oskar and The Last Straw. Our 1^st-5^th graders found Oskar’s path to coping with stress useful and hilarious!

Kinder and 1^st grade jumped back into their Code.org classes and learned to program the Bee Bots. Ms. Allende’s class then learned Are You My Mother by P.D. Eastman, created their own story maps, and programmed the bees to act out the story as they retold it.

Ms. DiPersio’s Monarch Heroes learned about the monarch migration with resources from Nat Geo Kids & Journey North. They created their own migration maps, made monarch costumes for the bees, programmed the migration, and the sang the migration story.

Ms. Mosquera’s 2^nd grade revisited their DaCamera Landfill Harmonic Music Encounter and created their own repurposed can cuicas. They did a great job and really loved decorating and playing them. They are also making steady progress on their Code.org course.

3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th grade started the week plugging back into their Code.org courses. They all had a great time learning to create optical coded tracks for the Ozobots.
3^rd investigated the water cycle via BrainPOP Jr.:

4^th learned how the changing seasons affect trees from Nat Geo, Discover Education, and NWF:

while 5^th grade selected science topics of personal interest from BrainPOP.

After they completed their note-taking they wrote scripts and created draft maps to share their learning. After they had a good final map, they added the Ozobot track and codes to have it act out the science story they were telling.

3^rd grade also started their DaCamera Music Encounters this week - 4 classes enjoyed learning about the science of sound from a cellist and a vocal musician!

Everyone enjoyed some Free Build Friday – OSMO was a popular choice this week – especially Masterpiece! Keva Planks, LEGO, puzzles, Lakeshore Learning Fairy Tale STEM kits, and K’NEX were also in heavy rotation!

5th graders also visited the observation station to learn to make their own microscope slides. They mounted bits of butterfly wing gifted to the lab by the HMNS Cockrell Butterfly Center.

K-2 Name That Book started filming their book reviews for the TV studio Tuesday, so look for those spots to start appearing on the morning announcements! Their daily read-alouds in the library have been going splendidly as well; thank you Ms. Belmarez and Ms. Leiva and also classroom teachers for supporting our reading team!

2019-20 STEAM Lab week 18

 A kind of mixed-up crazy schedule week, but students produced some wonderful work!

Monday kicked off with a presentation of Ms. Lee's 4th grader's Season's of a Tree projects for the Administration's Monday Meeting.

Ms. Mulry's 5th grade also came back to the STEAM lab to share their projects with Ms. Thompson's 2nd grade.

Ms. Hernandez’s kinder did a spirited version of Are You My Mother? With the Bee Bots and some fantastic artwork on their story map. They also completed several code.org puzzles in their course.

Ms. Brown’s 1^st graders did a great job on their Monarch Migration story map and sung their hearts out during the performance! These Monarch Heroes also did a great job on their Code.org this week!

Ms. Giron’s 2^nd grade put in some good work on Code.org in between work on the Da Camera inspired cuicas!

3^rd – 5^th had an introduction to the Ozobots, but due to rotating schedules for TELPAS practice they weren’t able to make the Robo-Retell projects. They did get a Free Build and some Code.org in though.

It was a completely different set of classes on the half day, but they thoroughly enjoyed a Free Build Friday!

Our Digital Making Club had its kick-off Tuesday and everyone did a great job! 4th & 5th graders teamed up to build the mBots, 3rd grade & 2nd grade got acquainted with Scratch. I am really excited to see what we make!

2019-20 STEAM Lab week 17

Welcome back to the STEAM Lab 2020 edition!

It was a great start to the new year with Robo-Retells, Reused can cuicas, and new Scratch + Makey Makey projects.

K-5 got reacquainted with their Code.org accounts – just two more rotations to try to complete their courses. But we spent most of our time on our projects this week.

Kinder learned to program the Bee Bots then made their own story maps for Are You My Mother by P. D. Eastman. They did a fantastic job on their Robo-Retells and really enjoyed themselves!

These Eco-Schools USA Green Heroes also had a Trash Bash on Thursday. Thank you for taking care of our campus and our planet!

1^st grade Monarch Heroes researched the annual migration phenomena via Nat Geo Kids and the Journey North resources. They then created their own mini migration maps and sang the Robo-Retell with the second verse of their theme song.

2^nd grade Recycling Heroes revisited their awesome DaCamera Music Encounter “Landfill Harmonic” and made their own repurposed can cuicas. Thanks to Ms. Telfah and her staff in our cafeteria for saving the cans for us! Students painted them and treated themselves (and anyone anywhere near the lab) to an impromptu cuica concert on Friday!

3^rd grade learned about the water cycle from BrainPOP Jr., created their own script and water cycle map for the Ozobots to travel. They learned to create the color codes to manage the speed and motion and did a good job making their maps.

K-3 were able to finish in time to squeeze in a Free Build Friday!

4^th and 5^th grade had much more elaborate projects and weren’t able to wrap them up until Friday. They will be having special presentation slots on Monday because they did such a great job!

4th grade teams of 8 researched the seasonal changes of trees via DK Findout and NWF online. Each pair in the team focused on one season. Each pair then created a script to explain their seasonal change and created a Scratch/ Makey Makey project that shared their explanation along with an animation of their tree changing and also an Ozobot map for a retelling of the story of a year for a tree. The pairs in each team combined their work to put the whole year together.

5^th grade teams of 2-6 selected their own topic to investigate on BrainPOP, then split up to create large scale Ozobot Robo-Retell maps and a Scratch/ Makey Makey project to share their learning.

Such an awesome way to start 2020!

2019-20 STEAM Lab week 16

Goodbye 2019! You were a great year, and we gave you a wonderful send-off in the STEAM lab with Free Builds galore!

We only had two days in the STEAM Lab, but they weren’t wasted!

Wednesday was a beautiful day, and we spent it outside for our Marathon Kids celebration. Everyone has completed their second marathon and several classes are started on marathon 3! 

Marathon Kids is an essential component of our overall healthy living campaign that feeds into our Eco-Schools and Fuel Up to Play 60 programs. With the addition of our wrap-around specialist, the awesome Ms. Argueta, to our team, we have added amazing programs such as Common Threads and Brighter Bites to extend the nutrition education beyond the classroom and into the wider community.

Our commitment to Healthy Living was on full display this week at two awesome events, Saturday's Cycle Houston 2nd grade Celebration:

and Tuesday night at our annual Holiday Program this year. Called “A Brighter Holiday”, the décor and theme promoted good nutrition and exercise. Our amazing Mr. Huerta filmed the event and you can view it here:

Thursday was a special viewing of the G/T Expo projects for our administration team. Students did a great job and their visitors were very impressed with their work.

It was an outstanding way to close out 2019; I am really looking forward to what we will learn and make in the new year!

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