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!