Lego Visits Pelham Elementary!

Lego Education is visiting Pelham Elementary School this week to work on robotics with a group of ten fourth graders. We are excited to try their products and learn more about math and science. Mrs. Doe is on a special Lego group called the Lego Education Advisory Panel. She and 24 other teachers in the United States will be working with Lego to try new things and give advice. Mrs. Doe has started teaching us about robots and sensors this year. The second graders built alligators, lions, and birds and made them behave like real animals.
The fourth and fifth graders are just beginning to try the Lego Mindstorms kits.
This is what they look like:

The Domabot that 4th and 5th graders are building.

The Alligator in the Wedo set.

Comics and Graphic Novels

In 4th grade we are examining the genres of comic books and graphic novels. Mr. Coutu, the art teacher at the middle school, visited us to explain some art techniques to use when creating your own comics. We loved watching him draw. Mrs. Doe received a grant from U.S. Cellular to help teach us about comics. We read from The Secret Science Alliance and then created our own comics with special storyboards and markers. We will award a prize to one student from every fourth grade class and a grand prize to the best comic strip in fourth grade.

Third Grade Engineering Challenges

Third graders are working through a series of three design challenges. The first is to build a snowplow that will move the most snow. Students work through our design steps of Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create, and Improve. Their snowplow needs to stay together when picked up on the tables. Next, students record the data as they try to push their snowplows through light snow (Styrofoam pieces), medium snow (Legos), and heavy snow (wet paper towels).

Their second challenge involves paper engineering and their third challenge will bring the computer into the design process as they design 3D houses in Google Sketch-up. Google Sketch-up is a free download from Google.

Flotsam-A trip around the world by our first graders! (Now second graders)

I am very excited to announce that my Google Lit Trip that I developed with the first graders has been published on the Google Lit Trip Web Site. The Lit Trip is based upon David Weisner's Caldecott winning book, Flotsam. Please take the time to check out other great Lit trips by students and teachers. A very big THANK YOU to Jerome Burg for this wonderful resource.

Here is an excerpt from the web site.

Flotsam is defined as debris floating on the ocean and is usually from shipwrecks. In the Caldecott winning book Flotsam, by David Weisner, the flotsam that washes ashore is a very special underwater camera. Come along for a trip around the world that follows the fantastical trip of a camera, the marine animals it captures on film and the children that find it.

This project was the combined effort of eight first grade classes and over 200 students. Each class listened and viewed the book Flotsam and each class was assigned a photograph from the book to investigate. Classes were divided into small groups and using Atlases and the Internet, each group decided where in the world the picture occurred. Using a large map and Wiki Stix, small groups picked locations, marked them with stickers and explained their decision making process to the whole class. Each class then voted and decided where their placemark would go on Google Earth. When all of the placemarks were decided, Mrs. Doe connected the locations with a path around the world. Students explored the Google Trip using Google Earth.

Check out the screen shots of the Google Lit Trip.

Flotsam Google Lit Trips Preview from GoogleLitTrips on Vimeo.

Second Grade Chair for a Bear Challenge

Check out the 2nd grade project, creating a chair for a bear. Students had to use the Lego Wedo sets to build a chair for a small stuffed bear. The chair needed to be at least an inch off the ground, hold the bear upright, and fit the bear. If students completed the challenge, they were asked to create an extra feature for the chair like a cup holder. This project resides on the website Voicethread.com.
Students are still in the process of adding comments. These chairs were built by Mrs. Houlne and Mrs. Zube's classes.