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Spring SAVY 2019, Day 1 – Witty Wordplay (1st/2nd)
Jan. 28, 2019—Dear Parents: Saturday, week 1, was a fabulous day for our wordsmiths! I was happy to welcome back friends whom I have previously taught in either SAVY courses or enrichment, and I was thrilled to make friends with students who are new to SAVY. After a few icebreakers, everyone felt at home. I wanted to...
Spring SAVY 2019, Day 1 – Wind and Wings: Beginner Biophysics (1st/2nd)
Jan. 28, 2019—We had a great first week of class! It was great to meet all the students and watch them interact. One of my hopes is that the students enjoy and learn from each other in our class. At the start of class, we talked about what scientists did to be successful, and the students came...
Spring SAVY 2019, Day 1 – Forensic Science (1st/2nd)
Jan. 28, 2019—What a great first day! We took some time to get to know each other, examine our crime scene, review case files, and read through our suspect profiles. Students learned that while in the office last week my laptop went missing! They were so excited to examine the crime scene and form some initial hypotheses. ...
Spring SAVY 2019, Day 1 – Discovering the Third Dimension (Kindergarten)
Jan. 28, 2019—What a terrific launch to our spring session! The first part of our morning was dedicated to getting know one other. We focused on learning names of our new friends, explored our similarities and differences by playing a few rounds of the game “A Warm Wind Blows,” and shared why we decided to study geometry....
Summer Career Connections at SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 5 – Kinematics for Mechanical Design (Rising 7th)
Jul. 27, 2018—This was the last day of Kinematics for Mechanical Design! We moved from analyzing four bar mechanisms to designing them. We learned two position rocker synthesis and two position coupler synthesis. These are two techniques to take desired limit positions of one link in a four bar, and come up with the positions of the...
Summer Career Connections at SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 5 – Science of Emotion (Rising 7th)
Jul. 27, 2018—Dear SAVY Parents, Thank you to everyone who came to our Open House this afternoon! These SAVY scholars have put in a lot of hard work this week, and we hope that they are as proud of their accomplishments as we are! Students spent the morning preparing for and presenting their elevator talks (some of...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 5 – Field Ecology (Rising 5th/6th)
Jul. 27, 2018—Dear Parents, Today was the final day of the Field Ecology SAVY course! Our focus for today was on how we as humans impact the world around us. Your children discussed the roles of both invasive species and urbanization on the environment and even came up with ways to mitigate these problems. We had a...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 5 – Theory, Criticism, and The Force (Rising 5th/6th)
Jul. 27, 2018—We began our session today with a fun review of topics and content. To contextualize the work with which we had ended our Thursday session – Edward Said’s theories of “Orientalism” – we watched a short video about cultural appropriation. The video, a selection from the MTV web series Decoded, led organically to a very...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 5 – Archaeology and Ancient Culture (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jul. 27, 2018—What an awesome week we have had with our budding archaeologists! Today was all about excavation and artifact analysis! After we finished working on our brochures from yesterday, we started working on excavating the archaeological sites we created yesterday. Just like real archaeologists, students had to excavate layer by layer. This was a challenge because...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 5 – Programming and Robotics (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jul. 27, 2018—Dear Parents, We have had a wonderful week with your children! The students have worked hard in learning our coding vocabulary and applying it to their code.org programs and in programming the Sphero robots. They worked well with each other in pair programming and problem-solving their programs. It has been a pleasure working with a...