Coding Electric Guitars

 We have spent a few sessions of our computer science class time to build a guitar and wire it up to our Makey Makeys.  Today, students used Scratch to revamp the already written code to personalize the sounds as they strum on the guitar.

Physical Education

 Our first unit in P.E. is disc golf. Students have been learning how to properly throw a disc (Frisbee). This week we selected "targets" or "holes" if you think of golf, to try to hit with our discs on the playground. Students are really getting good.  Next week I introduce them to the 3 courses I've created on our Beck playground. We will have score cards and play actual rounds.

Computer Science

 We began our computer science unit with Makey Makeys today. Students learned about the importance of grounding and complete circuits as teams made pianos with both Playdough keys and drawings.

Archaeology Dig

 Well the first week of school is up and going. Let's go 2021-2022 school year.  The end of week one saw our class participating in an archaeology dig on the playground.  The goal was to excite students about social studies this year, but also to help them understand that the early people we learn about is based on artifacts that are found, and we might not know the entire story.  Some groups in our class didn't find all the artifacts and had to analyze only those found, in an attempt to try to describe what culture(s) they came from.  

Stop Motion Movies

 Our final project of the year is to create a stop motion historical fiction movie about the California gold rush of 1849.  After researching and learning about the gold rush in social studies and reading, student began building their movie sets last week. This week they are connecting the topic to computer science and stop motion apps to film and add audio to the movies.

Living Museum

 What a wonderful celebration of our learning last week, as the Living Museum saw hundreds of students and many parents attend.

Living Museum- Writing

 Today we began putting all of our research together for our Living Museum project.  Using all the source notecards we have taken over the past three weeks, we first started by highlighting all the facts that we felt were most important. Then we broke the cards into categories, to become the different sections of our written paper.  After this, we numbered the facts in each category to create a more organized, linear order for the facts to appear in our writing.  Finally, we started pulling it all together and typing it up in first-person point of view. This will take several days, but will produce some top-notch writings.