December 2015 Updates

Wow, this week has flown by, and our blog posts are way behind!  Part of the problem was that the Edublogs site was down, but the other part is that we just haven’t had time.  The students and I have been super busy, and lots of great things are happening!

Here are some brief summaries of what is going on in the GT Classroom!

  • 1st and 2nd grades both participated in the Hour of Code in GT on Monday.  The 1st graders tried to code our Dash robot to travel from North to South America as we continue to study the continents.  The 2nd graders used an app called, “Box Island,” to learn some basics about sequences, loops, and conditional statements (we didn’t call them that in class, but they definitely figured out how to use them!)
  • The 3D printer so generously donated to our classroom by the parents is up and running!  We had a little glitch with connecting to the district network, but now it is working like a champ!  The 2nd-5th grade classes will have opportunities to design for it coming up soon! (Funny detail – the Aquanet hairspray was included in the box.  It’s used to make the build plate sticky!)

Photo Dec 10, 2 54 41 PM

  • 5th grade was invited to stream live to the District’s Principal’s meeting yesterday.  They got to show the principals how we do Socratic Dialogue in our classroom, and Odin got to ask our Superintendent, Dr. Gottardy, a question, “How do you balance safety and freedom when making decisions for our schools?”  Below is a picture of how our class was viewed by Mr. Bloomer, principal at Bradley.

Socratic Dialogue

    • The 3rd – 5th grade teams worked on their missions so their videos could be submitted by the 12/10/15 deadline to the Wonder League Robotics Competition.  We had four teams total, and it has been so fun to see how the different teams handled each mission!  It will definitely be clear to the judges that the students took control of the programming and “flair” as no two teams did the same thing!  I am embedding their competition videos below.  I had a couple of hours of panic last night while I tried to stitch all of the videos together for our submission because my home computer was so slow – but all of the videos did get submitted before the deadline!

4th Grade is Up to the Challenge!

The 4th graders are working hard on the missions for the Wonder League Robotics Competition.  It was great to see the group of 6 (Welcome, Keely!) synergize to complete the first 3 missions!  The challenges are difficult, and you definitely need to have a growth mindset to complete them.

We did not have time to complete our usual reflections today, but here are some photos of the team (The Ticking Timing Tigers) hard at work.

1st Grade Gets Some Perspective with Google Street View

The 1st graders got to see some amazing images of the countries they are researching by using Google Street View this week.  Many of the images were panoramic, and made them feel like they were actually standing in the middle of the attractions as they moved the images around.  It was a great way to virtually travel to their countries!

On Friday, the students reviewed some strategy games: Robot Turtles and Tic Tac Chec.  I got to play some Tic Tac Chec against three different students, and they really had me thinking!

1st Grade Finishes Up Their Shoe of Honesty Stories

The first graders did a fabulous job programming Dash (and Fitzgerald) to complete his hunt for the Shoe of Honesty on all 7 of the continents.  Their next task was to write an ending to the story to tell about what Dash found when he opened the locker where the Shoe of Honesty was supposed to be hidden.  We’re still working on the video of Dash’s exploits, but you can see the story endings below. (You can click on each image to view a larger version.)

Kinder Students Learn How to Think Like a Scientist

The Kinder students finished up “Magician Thinking” this week by playing a board game called, “Robot Turtles.”  This game helped them practice some basic programming skills that they learned from the “Daisy the Dinosaur” app. They got better at visualizing the steps they needed to take to reach the jewels in the center with the least number of steps.

We then started a short unit on “Scientist Thinking.”  For this type of thinking, the students look closely at items, and try to group them based on their similarities.  We played some games on the interactive board on Monday and Friday to practice sorting.  Then, on Friday, the students used magnifying glasses to match miniscule pictures with their larger counterparts.  Since their eyesight is far better than mine, I don’t think they really needed the magnifying glasses 😉

4th Grade Presents Their First Genius Hour Projects

This post has been brought to you by Athasi.

Today in GT we had our first two Genius Hour presentations. The first one was a game show about photography, and the second one was a play about Mars. Also, we tested a new version of Hopscotch, a programming app. We were given challenges like “draw a circle” and “create a dance routine”. We also went more in depth with Multiple Intelligences. Finally, we started centers.We could choose from a lot of different things including the brand new Makey Makey graciously donated by Mr. Hoffstadt.

1st Grade Finishes Up Haiku Riddles

This week, the first graders worked on finishing up their Haiku Riddles about the countries they are researching.  The students who had already finished their haikus did problem solving centers including one group who played Robot Turtles.  I loved watching the Robot Turtles group synergize to play the game without my help, and it was fun to see how challenging they made the board!

Witte Field Trip, Part 1

Today’s blog post is by Mahli.  I have not had a chance to go through all of the pictures the students took during our field trip, yet, so I will try to post them in the next couple of days.  The students were all very well-behaved, and seemed to really enjoy their time at the Witte.  If you try not to blink, you can even catch a few of our students in the KSAT news video below! (Thanks, Mrs. Borden, for passing that on!)
Mahli's blog post

 

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2nd Grade Works on Holiday Centers

After the students finished working on rough drafts of their Superhero cartoons, I gave them the rest of the morning to choose from different centers.  There were a couple of sudoku options – one was using old-fashioned pencil and paper, and one was on our interactive white board.  They could also play a logic/visual thinking game called “Factory Balls-Christmas Edition” on the laptops. Holiday tangram puzzles were popular.  Another choice was to use the iPad programming app that they learned about last week, Hopscotch, to create a holiday scene.  And, lastly, the students could look at our green anole with a huge magnifying glass and some beautiful crystals (brought in by Anna) under the microscope.  I also offered some drawing activities but, strangely, no one gravitated toward those!

My goal was for the students to choose activities that were challenging for them, and I was glad to see many of the students really showing some perseverance on the more difficult puzzles.  The candle tangram was particularly hard, but no one gave up!  As far as I could tell, everyone who tried it finally figured out the solution.  There was also a lot of synergizing to be seen in the classroom.  The students were very helpful to each other as they worked out the Winter Sudoku puzzle on the interactive white board.  And, whenever a new batch of students tried out the laptop game, there were always some “veterans” willing to show them the ropes.  It was the perfect last class for 2013!

1st Grade’s Participation in the Hour of Code

If you have been reading the other posts from this week, then you know that the GT classes have all taken part in the Hour of Code campaign going on this week. As part of Computer Science Education Week, kids all over the world are learning about computer programming.

Because the 1st graders had not been introduced to programming yet, I eased them into it with a great board game called Robot Turtles that I got from Kickstarter.  (You can read more about the game on my professional blog.)

We talked about “Rules” last week, so programming fit in very nicely with our curriculum.  The students learned the rules of Robot Turtle, and coding, on Tuesday.  Today, they applied what they had learned to an app called Kodable on the iPads.  They caught on very quickly!