Catching up...maybe

It has been a busy 2 months in STEAM.  Here are some of our lessons and activities:

Fire Safety - grade 1 and 2 learned to create a fire escape plan by building a house out of LEGOS.  Then they had to create a minimum of two exits for each area/room (doors or windows).  Plus students got to explore the website called "Sparky".  You can check it out at the following website - Sparky  Students took home a paper to create a family fire escape plan as well.  Fire Escape plan

Simple Machines - 3rd grade used Pebble Go to discover the six simple machines and discover common examples of each.  Then students used Flip Grid to share their knowledge in short video clips.  I do not have permission to share all of them, so I cannot post them! 
Finally, we played a simple machine sorting activity.  I am on a search for the link to this activity!

Serious research!

Creating a simple machine 

Watching FlipGrid videos

Shape fun with Kindergarten!  We have read three shape based stories including "Color Zoo", "The Perfect Square" and "The Greedy Triangle".  Students have learned how to use Pattern blocks to make various fall pictures including spiders and bats to turkeys and pumpkins.  There are many sites to find this printables.  This Reading Mama Blog




Finally, we went to tanagrams.  We use this video to create 5 different tanagrams together.  This week, I tried a tanagram center but the printables were light and the pieces do not line up well.

Perfect square creation - bridge/sun

Perfect Square - made a square pumpkin like Spookily

Pattern block - Mayflower

Pattern Block turkey

Pattern blocks - making a cat

Another attempt at pattern blocks

Tanagram center

BATS and BACK SCRATCHERS!
Students in 2nd grade learned about bats and made "fact" bats for the outside of the library using Pebble Go.  The template that we used was from Teacherific in 2nd grade - Bat.
I do not have any bat pictures. 

Then we went on to Back Scratchers in 1st and 2nd grade.  I started with a video from Sci Show Kids then we actually made them!
We used plastic forks, paper towel tubes, playdough, tape, rulers, and a pencil.  This was a huge success to thinking like an engineer!

Back Scratcher building

Team work

Amazing creations

Sharing our work

Every engineer must test it out

Creative ideas

BONE BRIDGES:
Finally, fourth grade re-visited Bone Bridges.  I tried to this opposite of computer work.  It was a design challenge for them!  The students struggled with the materials, time constraint, objective, etc...
A few came out amazing!  10 popsicle sticks, 10 straws, 30 q-tips, a plate, glue, 3 pipe cleaners, and newspaper.

Look for a few more shorter posts.  Sorry for the delay in posting!