Good Afternoon,
I hope you had a great weekend. I spent most of the weekend working on report cards and boiling sap. It was my girls first time doing. I think they were into it until the standing and watching sap boil part kicked in.
Today we continued our engineering focus in science. The kids worked on making their own mosaics, just like Simon did while building the towers. The students worked in teams and created two different designs with the same blocks. We then talked about why designs could/would be different even though the same blocks were used. The students then studied photos of the real towers to notice how Simon used "junk" to make his designs. In the Next Generation Science Standards, one of the performance expectations is to make observations to construct an evidence-based account of how an object made with a small set of pieces can be disassembled and made into a new object. One of the disciplinary core ideas of this is the understanding that a great variety of objects can be built up from a small set of pieces. This lesson highlighted that disciplinary core idea.
Tomorrow we will start a new unit of writing that focuses on the genre of opinion/persuasive. I apologize in advance if your children become more argumentative and/or want to spend time debating things.
I hope you have a great week.
Tommy
