Today was quite enlightening. Our big experience today was another engineering challenge with Ms. Dionysia’s class. We are still working on making things that roll, but our new K’nex kits made it even more fun! Today we recorded results and I’m proud to announce that the Wildcats (Maeve, Anja, and Jerome) had the winning roller, but they had some pretty stiff competition from Unicorns Love Slime and Team Flowers! Next week, we’re going to institute a leaderboard and examine the winning vehicles to see what characteristics they share. That way, we can use our knowledge of engineering to improve our own vehicles and get better every week. I’m seeing these engineering improvements in our classroom as well, like the incredible ramps and slides we have been building; they have been getting far more complex and are now featuring branching paths. These changes reflect our increasing ability to experiment and adjust our designs. Everyone enjoyed the experience of collaborating with older students and we are so thankful to work with them!
In our own investigations, we learned more about how colors blend and intensify. Today we dyed our rice (after explaining the difference between dye and die) different colors to see how the colors would change. We experimented with different numbers of drops to make the colors more or less vibrant, shook the cups more or less to experiment with different intensities in the same cup, and blended different colors to make our own shades. This physical experiment is a great extension of our work yesterday and is stretching us to generalize our experience of color to new mediums. Tomorrow, after the dye dries, we are blending them into the remaining white rice to see how they differ and what the blend will look like.
Our read aloud was intense, as there was a full blown dragon fight. Toothless and Fireworm got in a fight after Toothless insulted Fireworm, and all of the other dragons got dragged into it! One of the dragons even lit a Viking’s beard on fire, which many of us drew in our chapter picture for the day. These pictures are really doing a great job of showing that the students can recognize a specific scene from a story, depict it accurately, and then narrate what they have drawn. We’re all pretty nervous now, because we don’t know what is going to happen next, as that is NOT how the test is supposed to go. Fingers crossed that everything goes well tomorrow!
