SAVY Category
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 3 – Puzzles and Problem Solving (Rising 5th/6th)
Jun. 12, 2019—Most of the morning in Puzzles and Problem Solving was spent converting our classroom into an airplane…or at least a room with 7 seats and boarding passes. Consider the following scenario: The first person to board a fully-booked flight drops his or her boarding pass and doesn’t bother to pick it up. The person doesn’t...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 3 – Nuclear Science and Energy (Rising 5th/6th)
Jun. 12, 2019—So many surprises! After a warm-up and review of ALL the science we’ve learned the last few days, we have a chance to learn about nuclear power plants! Our visitor, a civil engineer who works with nuclear power plants came by to share her work with us. We compared the risks, hazards, and perceptions of...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 3 – Theory, Criticism, and The Force (Rising 5th/6th)
Jun. 12, 2019—Students of Theory, Criticism, and The Force: “Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is.” Master Yoda could have been speaking about you. He’d be impressed with the amount of content you assimilated during our session. Parents, if you’re reading this, brace yourselves: Your children absorbed a Holocron’s worth of information today! We began, as...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 3 – Archaeology 101 (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jun. 12, 2019—This morning in Archaeology 101, students taught each other key archaeological concepts such as “stratigraphy” and “relative and absolute dating”. I’m so impressed with how much they have learned! Following our big excavation yesterday afternoon, students gathered in their groups to process the artifacts that they uncovered. Building on their knowledge of relative dating, students...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 3 – Tremendous Transformations in Writing (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jun. 12, 2019—We started the day with another writing experiment, which students definitely enjoyed. They got to know their character a little better by putting them into a new setting and seeing how they react. The students were able to understand their character better by discovering strengths or weaknesses that were brought out by the change of...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 3 – Chemical Spill (Rising 3rd/4th)
Jun. 12, 2019—Hello Parents! Day 3 is in the books! We had another great day using the scientific method and our understanding of chemistry to help Vanderbilt clean up its chemical spill site. We are currently conducting an ongoing experiment to help us connect chemical effects to our living environment. Teams measured the height, width, and number...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 3 – Forensic Science (Rising 1st/2nd)
Jun. 12, 2019—Dear parents: As you might have guessed, we had another visitor in the crime scene room last night! This time, the person who was there left a note, in cursive, saying that they heard that my computer was missing and hoped I get it back. It was signed, “Me”. The crime scene team thought the...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 3 – Playing with Words (Rising 1st/2nd)
Jun. 12, 2019—Dear Families, We did so much today in Playing with Words! We began the morning with an introduction to similes and metaphors, using some of the comparisons we discovered in yesterday’s poems. We found similes in Robert Louis Stevenson (“The moon has a face like the clock in the hall,”) and metaphors in Jane Yolen...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 2 – Puzzles and Problem Solving (Rising 5th/6th)
Jun. 11, 2019—We began class today by delving deeper into the problems studied yesterday. Each day will begin with two questions designed to have the students apply the knowledge learned in the previous day to a new scenario. Today’s questions dealt with the 21-card game and ZipZap, and both questions led to interesting discussions about factors, multiples,...
Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 2 – Nuclear Science and Energy (Rising 5th/6th)
Jun. 11, 2019—What a great day! With nuclear power, we’re still building on the knowledge from yesterday – we’re working on the foundation of the tiny particles that are studied, analyzed, and utilized to help make nuclear power possible! The concepts of radioisotopes and nuclear decay was introduced, to see how radiation fits into this topic! This...