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Fall SAVY 2019: Day 3 – Measurement Matters (Grades 1/2)
Oct. 8, 2019—Hello SAVY parents! I can’t believe how fast the Fall session has come to an end. The last day was one filled with lots of learning. We began the class by reviewing the meaning of term perimeter. Students were able to use mathematical language learned in the previous class meeting to describe the term and...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 2 – Strength and Structure of Engineering Materials (Grades 5/6)
Sep. 30, 2019—This Saturday was our day of failure! We covered two types of sudden catastrophic failures. The first failure type we covered was buckling. Buckling strength is affected by many things, not just the material selected. To explore buckling strength, we got into groups and made beams with different heights, cross sectional shapes, and materials. Ask...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 2 – Spies and Conspiracies (Grades 5/6)
Sep. 30, 2019—What a great day! Our detective historians brought their A-game to today’s challenging conspiracies. Today, we explored Conspiracies in the Era of Confederation, basically the 1780s. We started with a little bit of music from Hamilton to remind us of last week, “Yorktown,” and then turned to “What Comes Next” to ask our leading question and...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 2 – Robotic Engineering (Grades 5/6)
Sep. 30, 2019—Today was a busy, but productive day in Robotic Engineering! We started the day with activity called “Build What I Can’t See.” Each team had one person who could see the drawing and a runner. The runner would describe to his/her team what to draw without telling them what they were drawing. It was a...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 2 – Spatial Smarts (Grades 3/4)
Sep. 30, 2019—Dear SAVY Parents, I was so thankful for cartographers and the fine work they do with spatial reasoning today! Our class met in a different building, but thanks to my online map and some spatial reasoning skills I have acquired, I made it to class in plenty of time! Phew! How do cartographers deconstruct and reconstruct visual...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 2 – Psychology in Action (Grades 3/4)
Sep. 30, 2019—Dear parents, Day two showcased some great ideas! It was full of insightful and intriguing questions that really pushed the students and I to think hard about symbols. We riled up our researchers with a spirited debate about what qualifies as a symbol. We split up into two teams (led by Mr. Israel and Ms....
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 2 – Programming and Robotics (Grades 3/4)
Sep. 30, 2019—Today these programmers learned that their job isn’t always creating new technology. They became aware that a big part of their job description is fixing or “debugging” programming problems. We started the day reading more of Peter Brown’s, The Wild Robot Escapes, to put our brains in the futuristic mindset of the world of robots....
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 2 – Measurement Matters (Grades 1/2)
Sep. 30, 2019—It was another fun day of learning this past Saturday in Measurement Matters! Students were able to make connections with measuring and the decisions necessary to obtain meaningful results. The students were presented with multiple tools that could be used to measure objects. We compared centimeters to inches and identified how these units of measure...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 2 – Archaeology 101 (Grades 1/2)
Sep. 30, 2019—Wow, what an exciting day in Archaeology 101! We started our day by reviewing key concepts from the week before such as “social network” and “artifact”. I was pleased by how much the students remembered! Today’s big concept was “stratigraphy”–a geological term related to the layering of the earth’s strata. Students learned that archaeologists excavate...