More about electrical circuits - Squishy Circuits

Our holiday cards were so much fun that Katie came in to teach the class more about electrical circuits.  We used squishy dough to make holiday creations that lit up.

Here are some photos so you can share in the fun.

Holiday Postcard Exchange

This holiday season, our class participated in a really fun project organized by Projects by Jen.  We made holiday cards for more than 20 schools and received cards back in return.  It was a fun way to find out more about the 50 states.  We also got one card from Canada.  I am thinking of extending this project next year and organizing some Mystery Skype sessions after we have made our card map.

Maybe the most fun was making our own cards though.  We learned about how electrical circuits work, then made cards with circuit stickers in them so we could make little LED lights light up.  I think these cards were very festive!

Hour of Code

Phew, thank goodness the electricity stayed on today despite the big storm.  Today was the day we participated in the Hour of Code during our Computer Lab time.  

The Hour of Code is a week-long event organized by Code.org, with the goal of exposing as many students as possible to coding. There are numerous coding tutorials on the Code.org website.  We picked the one featuring Angry Birds to experiment with today.  Here are links to other opportunities for elementary coders at Code.org.

If that's not enough coding for you, you can check out these other websites;

Made with Code

Bitsbox

Scratch

First Annual Thanksgiving Cardboard Construction Challenge

Wow!  I had read about classes, clubs and entire schools doing Global Cardboard Challenges, and I really wanted for our class to do one, but I honestly had no idea how it would really work out. When I looked at blogs to get advice, they mostly said the best thing to do was just to go for it, so we did!

The week before Thanksgiving, the class watched Caine's Arcade, a heart-warming video about a boy who builds an entire cardboard arcade one summer.  If you haven't seen the story of the boy who inspired the cardboard construction movement, it's definitely worth watching.

Then, the half-day Wednesday before the Thanksgiving break, students brought in lots of cardboard, lots of tape and one wonderful mom brought in all kinds of markers.  We had a nearly two hour block of time for the challenge.  The only rules were students could build alone or in groups of up to four people, students needed to be polite and kind, students needed to use their imaginations and they needed to have fun.

Here are the before photos:

Here are some photos from the event:

The morning was fantastic. Although it was pretty unstructured, the students quickly broke off into single person and multi-person groups.  They helped each other refine ideas - one of my favorites was when a race-car morphed into a pirate ship.  Another was when one student suggested to a friend that an egg carton section would make a perfect polar bear face (it did).  Students worked together to hold pieces in place for taping or adjusting.  Students negotiated different building groups almost seamlessly.  The ideas were flying around and for almost all of the time period, all of the students were building.  

This activity is a keeper for next year (without the styrofoam snow!)