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Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 5 – Neuroscience Navigators (Rising 2nd)
Jul. 27, 2018—Well, we made it! What an awesome week we had in Neuroscience Navigators! It was great to meet you all at open house. I hope you enjoyed getting to see and experience some of things we’ve been working so hard on this week. Once we wound down from early morning activities, we completed our final...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 5 – Playing With Words (Rising 1st)
Jul. 27, 2018—The Open House was a lot of fun watching students doing word ladders with their parents, and showcasing their learning from our week of word play! It was a pleasure to meet parents of our new students, and to talk to parents of returning students. The students and I finished our last ant words (N-Z),...
Summer Career Connections at SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 4 – Kinematics for Mechanical Design (Rising 7th)
Jul. 26, 2018—We started today with a brief introduction to linkages and used poster board and brads to experiment with four bar linkages. Then we continued to hone our drafting skills, this time with kinematic diagrams of various mechanisms. A kinematic diagram captures the motion of a linkage by representing pins as dots and links as straight...
Summer Career Connections at SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 4 – Science of Emotion (Rising 7th)
Jul. 26, 2018—Hi SAVY Parents, We can’t believe the week is almost over! We started the morning learning about scientific literacy, going over some of the basic rules for reading about science. As you all know, the internet is filled with pseudoscientific articles, articles with eye-catching titles claiming to have bizarre cures for various diseases and disorders....
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 4 – Field Ecology (Rising 5th/6th)
Jul. 26, 2018—Ahoy parents! Water day made a splash! Today we dove into the world of aquatic ecology! Since most of the world’s water is saltwater, we began the day with discussions on ocean circulation and the impacts it has on different ecosystems. We talked about water density and how salinity (or saltiness) affects density and how...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 4 – Theory, Criticism, and The Force (Rising 5th/6th)
Jul. 26, 2018—To remind ourselves of Saussure’s signifier, signified, and sign, we played a game where students were tasked with identifying signifiers from certain characters or scenes from A New Hope. We also clarified that the endless chain of signification is not mere free-association. The chain of signification leads to larger, more encompassing concepts as one travels...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 4 – Archaeology and Ancient Culture (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jul. 26, 2018—It’s Day 4 already!!!! Today, we started pulling all the big ideas about social, economic, and political systems together! This morning, our students read a really challenging reading about the Maya collapse. There were a lot of challenging words, but our students powered through and understood more of it than I had expected! We discussed...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 4 – Programming and Robotics (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jul. 26, 2018—Dear Parents, Happy Thursday! Only one more day with your awesome children and we will be sad to see them go. We had a productive day today learning more vocabulary, advancing with our code.org lessons, and programming our robots. We began the morning with a live demo. I did this to show the students how...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 4 – Neuroscience Navigators (Rising 2nd)
Jul. 26, 2018—Our fourth day in Neuroscience Navigators was another great one! Like the previous days, we started with a class concept map. This time, we spanned nearly the whole white-board, putting all of the new pieces of information we’ve been learning together. We also reviewed our results from the ruler-drop experiment, and found that while our...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 4 – Playing With Words (Rising 1st)
Jul. 26, 2018—Our word ladder this morning started with the word, present, which bumped us up to a 7-letter word for the start of our ladder. In addition, (yes, it was intentional), we got to discuss how some words may be spelled the same way, but have different meanings (homonyms), and that context is the key on...