Restaurant Wars continue! This week, students in Emmarose's group completed their blueprints, and began to construct three dimensional models of their tiny restaurants. Inspired by the guiding question, What is the relationship between producers and consumers?, students were challenged to create a space that provided a good experience for customers. Restaurant groups thought critically about how their decor and interior design both represented their theme and created exper

Over the past few weeks students have been working to design and create their ideas for cereal companies. Each group has finalized their ideas and completed their cereal boxes. Currently, they are in the process of thinking critically about what their cereal boxes and commercials are communicating to the consumers (their audience). Students will incorporate at least two of the marketing techniques that they have learned into their commercials and cereal box designs. Through

Wondering why we are playing with representing numbers in all grades from K through 5? We believe that children need opportunities to internalize many different ways that number are represented. Not only does this practice build fluency with number recognition, but it enables children to compare numbers in any possible way. In Brie’s group, matching pieces include representations of numbers in ten frames, arrays, tallies, and written words. In order to compose their first

Last Friday, Emmarose and Paiges' groups had the opportunity to visit with guest speaker and parent, John Tompkins, who is a neuroscientist at UCLA. First, students were able to see how knowledge of the body systems can lead to a career outside of healthcare professions. Furthermore, students engaged in collaboration by sharing their own understanding of body systems and how they work together. During John's guided observations about the different parts of the brain, E.C. pr

This week students continued their exploration of visual representation of numbers through a fun game from youcubed.org. Students used their knowledge of factors and strategy to play Factor Connect Four. They drew a card from the deck and identified what larger number(s) their number could belong to. For example, when a student draws 4, it is a factor of 8, 12, 16, 20, etc. Students were asked to be skeptics of others’ answers, which required giving specific reasoning and

It’s never too late to slow down. You’ll be surprised what else you see when you just pause. Believe us…we tried it! As summer approaches, we feel warmth and excitement in the air. Lately, the energy in Brie’s room has matched the squawking of the parakeets in the trees. Students are growing so rapidly as communicators, problem-solvers, and friends that it’s time they put everything in slow motion to take a long, deep breath. This week, while listening to peaceful music,

The restaurants are taking shape! With final restaurant names decided on, students embarked on the task of creating a logo for their restaurants. This week, students in Emmarose's group worked through the Design Thinking Toolkit with their restaurant logos, moving on from research to the brainstorming phase. After observing many different logos and finding common themes and elements, students felt prepared to decide upon their logo constraints and requirements as a whole g

During Communication Literacy Paige's group has been engaged in a case study on biographies. The students have used biographies as a way to explore an author's purpose of informing an audience. During group debriefs, students observed that biographies do more than teach us facts about a subject's life. L.B. noted that "you can just Google it instead." Rather, the group observed that we can learn about how other people in the world use or don't use the mindsets. For example,

Can you see above the table when you are hiding below? Brie’s group began the week making adjustments to their periscopes with more reflective mirrors. They played a game where they hid and used their periscopes to identify colored magnet tiles above the table! Wonder what they will use their periscopes for at home… Through their inquiries with mirrors, lenses, and CDs, students are learning that sometimes light bounces, sometimes it bends, and sometimes it scatters into a

www.youcubed.org This week in Patterns and Modeling, students worked on an activity from Jo Boaler's, YouCubed. Students were presented with a number visual, showing different dot patterns that represent a number. They were invited to explore this depiction of numbers and to see what patterns they could uncover in the visual representations. In addition, students discovered what primes look like as they investigated the different factors inside numbers. Numbers contain all