Our 100th day of school will officially be Wednesday, January 28, but we decided to start celebrating early in the Learning Commons Maker Space. We set up several activities for students to create something using 100 items. We had Legos, Lego bricks, magnets, straws, cups, cardboard squares and puzzles. These activities will be available all next week giving most classes a chance to participate. Fun was had by all! 

Don’t forget math night, Monday, January 26! Hope to see you there!

Kindergarten students are learning about fractals. We used the song “Let it Go” from Frozen. She sings about her “frozen fractals”. The children could sing right along but were not sure what frozen fractals were. We used the book Mysterious Patterns: Finding Fractals in Nature to see what things we knew about in nature that are considered fractals like broccoli, trees and lightning. We then worked as a class using the site rectangleworld.com to make a snowflake with our own repeating fractal. 

Check out our new display corner on our new circulation desk! We have highlighted books that support math and shopping! Hope to see you there, January 26!

Our new shelving, circulation desk and soft seating arrived today! Out with the old…. in with the new! Doesn’t it look amazing!!!

Happy New Year Scouts! Hope you had a wonderful holiday with family and friends. Wanted to share two great documents with you. One pertains to making a Reading Resolution (as your New Year’s resolution) with your children and the other has ideas for how reading at home can make a HUGE difference for your child.

TipsForParentsReadingAtHome

Reading Resolutions from Scholastic

Kindergarten got in on the Bee Bot action today along with first graders! We were locating natural resources on the grid with Kindergarten such as mountains, rivers, oceans and forests after we practiced sending the Bee Bot back and forth to each other!

We had our first try with programming the Bee Bots that the PTO purchased for us. Ms. Umbarger’s class has been working on the text features of non-fiction text, so we had 4 of those features on the Bee Bot grid. The children took turns programming the Bee Bot to go to a particular feature. We used a table of contents, an index, a glossary and bold print. They used Bee Bot task cards to plot their path, then programmed the Bee Bot and set him in motion. Great way to review, program and learn!

Bee Bots in Action

As promised here are some pictures of Ms. Ridenhour’s first graders working on the Hour of Code using Kodable on the iPads.

After participating in the Peter Reynolds author study with the Global Read Aloud, the second graders did a culminating activity. We read, Going Places, and then used K’Nex blocks to create something that would move. The only requirements were that it had to move. The students enjoyed being creative and came up with cars, elevators, levers and other interesting items. Now the K’Nex blocks, legos, Goldie Blox and Gears have been placed in the MakerSpace for the students to continue exploring. The students use their Scout Shout outs to buy time to return to the Learning Commons and “make” in the MakerSpace.