Today in 6th grade the scholars learned about civic engineers and structural engineers. Their challenge was to build a structure with copy paper and tape that could carry a Geometry book for 30 seconds. They planned their projects by drawing out their structure and finding the weight of the Geometry book. They had a lot of fun and did a great job!
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Today 6th grade went to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. They learned a lot about environment, insects, and their habitats. They took a tour in the new exhibit and they were so excited. After this they started working with K’Nexs, which they used to build bridges and towers. They were so excited and were on their best behavior as well.
Today 6th grade worked on straw towers. They were given tape, scissors, and straws and they used these supplies to build their towers. They were so excited and room was buzzing with ideas and creativity. The challenge was to only use 50 straws and 3ft of tape to build their tower. Each straw “cost” 200$ a piece and tape was 100$ a piece, but they had a 10,000$ limit that they couldn’t go over. The goal was to have the strongest structure under metal grams that cost the least amount of money. The challenge went really well overall, and scholars had a lot of fun.
Last session, the 6th graders created a tower that could withstand a mini earthquake. Today, the kids had to work together in order to build the tallest straw tower that is capable to support the weight of a book. They had to use limited amounts of tape and straws to create their tower and had to keep under a budget they were given.
Today was the second session of the school year and 6th grade is still the best class. Today they learned about engineering and the process that engineers go through to design. Their project was to draw a design of a structure that could withstand an earthquake it’s called Shake-it-Up . They then took the design they made and used clay and straws to make their designs real. After they have to test how stable their structure is during an earthquake. They are super excited about this project and they did a really good job with their Shake-it-Up experiments. In fact, they all succeded on thier first trial. They are all super proud of themselves and their classmates.
Today was 6th grades’ first day. They did a project with their nametags and got to personalize their journals. For snack they did an engineering challenge. Thete had to make a tool out of newspaper and tape to get their snack down off the wall. The students had fun designing their tools and helping eachother out with getting their snack down.
Today, the 6th grade class learned a few new vocabulary words. These words were live load, dynamic load, dead load, and static load. Then they built K’nex bridges that were suprisingly able to hold a lot of weight. While adding weight onto the bridge, the students also recorded what parts of the bridge began to bend or seem weak. They found out that the longer a bridge is, the more support there will need to be in the middle of the bridge in order for it not to colapse or bend inward.
Today, the students continued to explore Kinect building blocks. The class later moved to a Carousel activity where they wrote down all they knew about the science and engineering terms. In a seperate group, there were 3 students who were put to the task to build a tower out of popsicle sticks, binder clips, and clothespins. They had a very difficult time connecting the popsicle sticks and building up, but evenually they caught on and were able to build a tower. Although it was not very stable, they were able to keep adding onto it.
Today the class had a guest speaker, Mr. Nemeth, he came to talk to the class about the Walgreens net zero store to hopefully spark some ideas for the class to use in their green homes, or incorporate some things they saw in the video they were showed, to their home. For Math, everyone got the oppurtunity to look up the cost of any necessary applainces that they would have to have in their homes or might not have depending on their green home’s location. Each group was also able to look up the cost to power their homes using the specific energy source each group was assigned. To try and get into the swing of things, everyone tried out the Google sketch up program on the laptops to mess around with it and get an idea on how they will make their home.
Today the 6th grade class worked on a webquest to help them learn more about building bridges. In addition, the students also learned about certain mistakes that have happened with the design of bridges, which have caused accidents, such bridges collapsing, to occur. After completing the web quest, the 6th grade class experimented with kinect building blocks to see how the blocks would work when building a bridge.