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Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Strength and Structure of Engineering Materials (Grades 5/6)
Sep. 24, 2019—Hello SAVY Parents! What a fun first day we had in Strength and Structure. This Saturday we started with an investigation of the foundations of strengths and structures, materials science! We learned how different bond types (ionic, covalent, and metallic) result in different material types, all of which serve different functions in building. The three...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Spies and Conspiracies (Grades 5/6)
Sep. 24, 2019—Greetings, Parents! This week, our SAVY students learned the keys to becoming historians and began delving more deeply into the critical but under-appreciated era of the Early Republic (Early US 1780-1800, roughly). We kicked off our day with introductions and setting our classroom rules. I asked our group to answer the following question: if you...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Robotic Engineering (Grades 5/6)
Sep. 24, 2019—Dear SAVY parents, These future programmers and engineers were busy today! We didn’t waste any time diving in to our content today, as we began the day with a discussion of the engineering design process and used it to build our first EV3 robot cars. Students worked with a team and had the freedom to...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Spatial Smarts (Grades 3/4)
Sep. 24, 2019—Dear SAVY Parents, What a great day of fun and learning! The children jumped right in to the activities and discussions despite the idea of spatial reasoning as a mathematical task being a relatively new topic of study for them. Math is the study of quantity, structure, space, and change. The concepts are fascinating, challenging,...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Psychology in Action (Grades 3/4)
Sep. 24, 2019—Dear parents, We had a wonderful first day exploring symbols as a class; I was very excited to have the opportunity to work with a new generation of researchers! It is clear to me that each member of our new research team is coming in with a lot of experience and great ideas about how...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Programming and Robotics (Grades 3/4)
Sep. 24, 2019—These programmers had a great first day conceptualizing the world of robotics! We started by reading the first page of Peter Brown’s best seller, The Wild Robot Escapes. This gave us a foundation to discuss how robots know what tasks to perform. Then we dipped our toes into writing algorithms for our classmates to carry...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Measurement Matters (Grades 1/2)
Sep. 24, 2019—Hello SAVY parents! Our first session of Measuring Matters was a lot of fun. Our first investigation focused on learning standard units of measure. We learned about the two systems of measurement (customary and metric) and discussed the differences between the two. We learned that while in the United States we use the customary system...
Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Archaeology 101 (Grades 1/2)
Sep. 24, 2019—Hello Parents! We were so excited to begin Archaeology 101 and loved meeting all of our students! Our day began by setting class rules and assessing students’ knowledge of the class topic. I was impressed with how much they already know about archaeology. During our morning session, we discussed what archaeology means, what archaeologists do,...
SAVY 2019: Session 6, Day 5 – Power of Poetry (Rising 5th/6th)
Jul. 26, 2019—Dear Parents: Happy Friday, and a very happy, celebratory, and rejuvenating last day of Poetic Play to all! I am, as ever, grateful to all the students this week for creating such a wonderful class community of respect, awe, and courage in themselves as rising writers, and in the world around them! Thank you, thank...
SAVY 2019: Session 6, Day 5 – The Great Debate (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jul. 26, 2019—This week flew by! I was so lucky to have these 15 amazing children to work with this week! Today we some dub all we had learned yesterday about whether or not the government is responsible for the welfare of the individuals. Students worked in groups to create a concept map. Then, with their same group,...