Presenting: Engineering!

Our engineering research in 5th grade has given us an idea about how expansive the field of engineering really is.  Turns out there are over 200 various fields and that number seems to be growing.  Students researched a sepearte field they seemed interested in such as environmental engineering or electrical engineering, found out annual average salary, listed universities offereing that degree plan, types of classes to take in high school and above if interested in that job, and what duties these engineers perform in their jobs.  Our students tried some new methods of teaching us about their topic with presentation platforms like Kahoot and Powtoons:

Abby B.

  Faith

  Gabriel Ben

What is so deep and complex about Halloween?

Wanted to update everyone on the happenings in GT pullout in the last few weeks.  Grades 1-3 created a word cloud of their own powerful traits to make a t-shirt their self-portrait could wear. These have become positive sentinels in our room, always encouraging us to become the powerful people we know we can be.  Our studies took us to our first inspirational person:  Nancy Brinker, the founder of the Susan G. Komen foundation.  We learned about Nancy's important story of her sister's experience with breast cancer and how Nancy created the foundation in honor of her sister to help others with the disease.  We also looked at 10 charitable foundations created by children, some as young as 4 years old!  Finally, some of us created our own awareness ribbon to show others our own causes.

We used Halloween in GT pullout as a learning experience by completing different "spooky" rotations.  One of our favorites was the engineering challenge station where we had to create the tallest or most detailed haunted mansion in the time frame; another was the teacher table with Mrs. Imrie where we used our icons of depth and complexity to dig into the Halloween event even more.  We discussed the big ideas of, trends in Halloween costumes, origination of the name and day itself, multiple perspectives of Halloween, such as what our parents thought of Halloween as well as how Halloween has changed over time and many others.  Many of us said our parents had to work hard to make sure we had our costumes, decorations and candy (multiple perspectives)--I had to agree!!

Grades 4 and 5 have continued working on their engineering research.  More coming soon.