Voting, fire safety, and leaves

 This year looks very different in a STEAM room during a pandemic...technology has the been the goal of the 1st 9 weeks.  Practicing skills in the event that we end up at home has been a big priority as well as figuring out safe ways to engineer.  I am excited by some units coming up in December!

This week, I created some video lessons using LOOM and uploaded them to Clever for K-2 (and it worked!) and TEAMS for 3rd and 4th.  It worked except for the one class that was not scheduled correctly (and I was out for dentist appointments).  1 out of 26 is not horrible!

Overall this is allowing me to see if they can watch my "lesson" and work independently on a task.  The answer is mostly NO, but it lets me tweak and modify as numbers rise in our county!  

Students are also getting to experience voting.  My 4th graders often remember walking to the gym in 1st grade to go and vote.  I hope that a few of my current 1st graders remember voting in STEAM in 4 years!  The website link was created by Pebble Go.  It is a secure website, so they also get to see the fun process of when you click "I am not a robot"...then you get to pick all of the traffic like pictures or the hills or vehicles.  2nd - 4th grades do this as individuals at their desk.  K and 1 come and see me to make their "vote" while the others watch a video on trees.

In addition, 3rd and 4th grade "researched" the two candidates to make a more informed decision when voting.  We used two different versions of Pebble Go Biographies and talked about databases vs. googling information.  It was a challenge for most of them to take the information off the computer and put it on paper!

K-2 did fire safety by exploring Sparky's website.  This is a favorite activity! They also listened to information on the two presidential candidates.

In mid-October, we took a technology break for a variety of reasons.  The topic was leaves...we discussed chlorophyll and photosynthesis.  K and 1 read "Leaf Man" then created their own "Leaf Man" with a leaf tracer then adding special details.  2nd - 4th created 3 dimensional leaves.  It was an inspiration of two bloggers together that let me create the tracer and a do-able pattern!  
Stlmotherhood blog and Makes and Takes blog

Here are some leaf pictures:

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