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Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- Poetry in Practice (Rising 4th/5th)
Jul. 18, 2017—The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was a proponent for mining one’s life experiences for poetic subject material. That’s what we’re trying to do this week. We continued revising yesterday’s poems by taking out the key emotionally resonant lines and adding them to a new poem with syllabic structure. We also used an anaphora exercise inspired...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- Programming and Robotics (Rising 4th/5th)
Jul. 18, 2017—Today, we started off by reviewing our two ideas from yesterday: Loops make our programs more efficient for repeated tasks Computers need explicit and detailed instructions Then, we learned the word “algorithm” to describe these types of detailed instructions. We practiced created algorithms for tanagram patterns. After reviewing the ideas from yesterday, we learned a...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- Archaeological Adventures (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 18, 2017—Our budding archaeologists had another great morning! Today, we covered two important lessons: dating in archaeology and preservation. First, we discussed the different methods archaeologists use to identify how old artifacts are. Students put this knowledge to practice by first lining themselves up by order of their ages. This involved cooperation from every member of...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- Neuroscience Navigators, Conrad/Nguyen (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 18, 2017—On the second day of Neuroscience Navigators, we built on our knowledge of neuroanatomy by watching Mr. Ben and Mr. Tin each dissect a sheep brain and talk through all of the parts. They made a sagittal cut and we saw the Corpus Callosum, which is the structure that connects the left and right hemisphere....
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- Neuroscience Navigators, Wilkey (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 18, 2017—On the second day of Neuroscience Navigators, we built on our knowledge of neuroanatomy by connecting parts of the brain to their function. We started the day by building our very own brain hats that label the four lobes (frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal) as well as the motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex. If...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- The Math in Music (Rising 1st)
Jul. 18, 2017—The Math in Music class had an excellent second day! The morning began with some fun music making – we were dancing, singing, and playing lots of instruments. We learned a new song and made egg maracas using plastic eggs, beans, and rice. Students learned that different materials can impact the way instruments sound! We...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- What’s the Matter (Rising 1st)
Jul. 18, 2017—Dear parents: Today was a wonderful second day in our What’s the Matter course! We were very busy today with lots of hands-on investigations. We began our day reading two books, Ada Twist, Scientist and 14 Experiments That Failed. We reviewed some important things that scientists do and how important it is to never give...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 1- Computational Astrophysics (Rising 6th/7th)
Jul. 17, 2017—On our first day of Computational Astrophysics, we got into coding right away! We started by talking about why astronomers have to write computer code. The students came up with the basic “ingredients” we need in order to build a solar system – or anything in our Universe. The students told me about their experience...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 1- Commodore Investment Fund (Rising 6th/7th)
Jul. 17, 2017—Today we embarked on our journey into the world of Wall Street. Most students began the day having never heard the phrase “strategic investing” so we started by answering the following questions by first using the words “investment” and “market” as they are typically used to hearing them. What is an investment? Students came up...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 1- Poetry in Practice (Rising 4th/5th)
Jul. 17, 2017—Gifted students are notoriously literal, so a poetry class can provide a fun challenge when it comes to encouraging students to use abstract thinking. Fortunately, poetry’s imaginative qualities are balanced out by limiting qualities such as structure. We started the day by loosening up our writing muscles by doing some free association writing exercises. Then...