#CollaboratoryCubs Conquer Our Short Week

Although it was a short week, it was a busy week in the TES Collaboratory!  Take a look at what we did:

Our kindergarten designers began their "Designing Bridges" unit this week!  As with all of our Engineering is Elementary units, the learning kicks off with an empathy-based core literature piece that sets the foundation for the unit.  The story for this unit is "Javier Builds a Bridge".  The kinders made some really insightful comments about the story and about how to help Javier solve his problem.  One of the key words introduced in the story was "sturdy" because Javier was in need of a sturdier bridge.  Therefore, after the story, the kinders got to explore some different building materials and decide if they were "sturdy" or not.  

Our first and second graders entered the world of coding this week!  They learned some computer programming basics, and they were introduced to the following "code words":  command, algorithm, debugging, and loop.  They explored a variety of coding activities to apply their learning.  They got to test out Coji the Emoji Robot, the Code-and-Go Robot Mouse, Snap Circuits, and Active Code Hopper.  

Collaboratory Cubs and Contests

The Collaboratory has been buzzing with excitement!  This week, we officially launched our new student-created hashtag for the Collaboratory.  The students did some brainstorming and created a bunch of creative hashtags, and then the classes got to vote on which hashtag was their favorite.  It was a tight race, but the winner was...#CollaboratoryCubs!  Make sure you follow this new hashtag on Twitter!

The students have also been busy working on their entries for two different contests that we felt were awesome Collaboratory opportunities:  Made by Milk's Carton Construction Contest and Scholastic's If Kids Could Cure Contest.  For Made by Milk's Carton Construction Contest, the students were challenged to use recycled (and cleaned out!) milk cartons from our school to build a structure that represented this year's contest theme:  sports.  Since our students love STEAM initiatives and because they did such a great job creating recycled robots at the beginning of the school year, we knew that they would love this challenge.  We decided to go with a football theme to tie in with the NFL Play 60 program and to honor the Seneca football players who come to read to our classes and always support our school activities.  Take a sneak peek of our finished product: 

The message behind Scholastic's If Kids Could Cure Contest really spoke to us, and we were very eager to participate!  We are always talking about having empathy for others and creating positive change in the world, and this contest really got the students thinking about how they could make the world a better place.  This contest challenged students to think of a real-world problem, large or small, and create and describe a way that they feel they could solve it.  Their responses were truly impressive, and I can't wait to send in all of their entries!