SAVY Category
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...
Summer Career Connections at SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 3 – Kinematics for Mechanical Design (Rising 7th)
Jul. 25, 2018—This morning, we practiced analyzing compound gear trains using the number of teeth to determine the overall gear ratio of the gear train. Then we produced a two-view drawing of some compound gears. Next we moved on to designing compound gears. That is, determining the numbers of teeth for the gears in each of two...
Summer Career Connections at SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 3 – Science of Emotion (Rising 7th)
Jul. 25, 2018—Dear SAVY Parents, This morning, students continued to craft their emotion research questions. As a class, students helped each other identify the independent and dependent variables of their classmates’ proposed research questions, determined different ways to measure the variables in their experiments, and came up with ways to increase the internal validities of their experiments....
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 3 – Field Ecology (Rising 5th/6th)
Jul. 25, 2018—Dear Parents, We were very excited today for Microbe Day! We taught the kids all about microbes in the world around us and how they fit into the larger ecosystem. They learned about microbial myths and facts, characteristics of microbes, and their applications. They also learned how to look at microbial plates under the microscope...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 3 – Theory, Criticism, and The Force (Rising 5th/6th)
Jul. 25, 2018—What a day! We covered a significant amount of content during our session. Your students should have a wealth of ideas, concepts, and terminology to share around the dinner table this evening, as well as a number of different and unexpected critical responses to Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. We began our class...
Summer SAVY 2018: Session 6, Day 3 – Archaeology and Ancient Culture (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jul. 25, 2018—I can’t believe we are over halfway through our week already! Today was a really fun day! We started by reviewing what we learned yesterday about Maya economic systems before we moved on to political systems. We also learned about some of the methods archaeologists use for dating artifacts and sites by practicing dating artifacts...