Summer SAVY 2022/Session 1 – Matter Mysteries for Rising 1st/2nd Grade
Coming Soon!
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 4, “Engineering Design: Full STEAM Ahead!” (1st-2nd)
Jul. 24, 2025—We had a thriving Thursday today! Our morning meeting started with sharing whether summer or winter is our favorite season. There were quite a few winter lovers, and I am certain these over-the-top hot days may be contributing to that 
Our ASK question today was “How can we use our knowledge of materials, different...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 4, “Earth Science Rocks!” (1st-2nd)
Jul. 24, 2025—Greetings from Machu Picchu Day! Today was the day we started making connections with all we have learned so far—rocks, mountains, erosion, soil. The major project of the morning was a brief review of the week’s activities so far, an introduction to Machu Picchu, and a discussion of the farming practices on the mountain, where...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 4, “Dive Into Design” (1st-2nd)
Jul. 24, 2025—Happy Thursday! Today, we explored the fundamentals of accurate measurement! We created straw paths with twists and turns to see whose path was the longest. We learned about 90-degree angles and how twists and turns can appear to make the length of something look shorter than it really is. We also encountered a crazy swimmer...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “The Great Debate” (5th-6th)
Jul. 23, 2025—Good afternoon, families and students! It’s been another exciting day of debate and persuasion! This morning, we started the day with flash debates on silly topics (yes, pineapple absolutely SHOULD be on pizza and chairs, it turns out, are just failed beds!) that allowed us to shake off some of our public speaking nerves and...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “Greek Mythology 2.0” (5th-6th)
Jul. 23, 2025—Happy Wednesday! We had another fun day in Greek Mythology 2.0! While the first two days of class focused on forgotten titans, gods, and other immortal figures, today’s lessons focused on forgotten heroes and humans from the mythology canon. We began by diving a little bit deeper into the story of Pelops (we had already...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “Astronomy Tricks of the Trade” (5th-6th)
Jul. 23, 2025—Our class had their first attempt at viewing with some of Dyer Observatory’s telescopes today. We began with another entry in our Sun observation logs with students recording the positions of where sunspots appeared today in the Solar Dynamics Observatory image, and many noticed a drastic amount of movement over just 48 hours. Afterward, a...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “The Story of You! An Invitation to Write and Explore Autobiography” (3rd-4th)
Jul. 23, 2025—Happy Wednesday! Today, we began our day by thinking about someone who makes us feel special and thinking about why we love them. This came from a book called “Question a Day Journal for Kids” that they will get to keep and bring home with them on Friday! We are doing days 1 through 4...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “Numbers Big and Small” (3rd-4th)
Jul. 23, 2025—Today was another fun day of math with your children! We explored some of our favorite math concepts today: palindromes, probability, prime numbers, and simple order of operations. We started the day discussing the art piece, M.C. Escher’s famous “Relativity.” The students had fine insight into the impossible angles of the staircases. They...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “Forces of Nature: Wind, Energy, and Engineering” (3rd-4th)
Jul. 23, 2025—Day 3 – July 23, 2025 | 
Creating and Testing Sail Designs Today, our classroom transformed into a sail testing lab! We introduced a new engineering challenge: Can we figure out which materials make the best sails for catching wind? This question led us into a thoughtful, hands-on investigation where students predicted how different...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “Engineering Design: Full STEAM Ahead!” (1st-2nd)
Jul. 23, 2025—We had a wonderful Wednesday today! Our morning meeting started our day by sharing about our pets, and if we did not have a pet, we shared what pet we would want. There are quite a few dogs, cats, and fish in our homes! Today’s morning discussion jumped off with a review of what we...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “Earth Science Rocks!” (1st-2nd)
Jul. 23, 2025—Hello, families! It was another fun day in class! Today, we began to link rocks with erosion and soil. We finished our erosion experiments yesterday and sanded and filed various rocks, then predicted what would happen. The kids were amazed that the metal file worked on the rock. Interestingly, this class has led the...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 3, “Dive Into Design” (1st-2nd)
Jul. 23, 2025—Happy Wednesday! We had a wonderful Wednesday! The morning started off with a virtual visit from an architect student, Ms. Ashley. She shared about some of the classes she has taken, ranging from studio design and history of architecture and interiors to environmental systems, and color and lighting. We learned how math, chemistry, art, and...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 2, “The Great Debate” (5th-6th)
Jul. 22, 2025—Good afternoon, families and students! Today was such an exciting and fun day of diplomacy and debate! To begin the day, we participated in an ice breaker created by Ms. Cristina, where we each chose an important item to us and then had to use one of our rhetorical strategies to explain our item to...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 2, “Greek Mythology 2.0” (5th-6th)
Jul. 22, 2025—Happy Tuesday! We had a fabulous second day of Greek Mythology 2.0. After some brief warm-up activities and review games, we finished up our study of some minor gods (a continuation of yesterday afternoon’s lesson), and then we played a version of “guess who” to review all of the gods and titans that we have...
Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 2, “Astronomy Tricks of the Trade” (5th-6th)
Jul. 22, 2025—Today, the astronomy students made their first visit to Vanderbilt’s Dyer Observatory in Brentwood, Tennessee. Upon arrival, we began a short tour through the observatory’s exhibits, including discussions of the scale models of the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope that reside in the observatory library. One of the unexpected highlights was the...