Earth Day:  The Recycled Baseball Way

Earth Day is an exciting time in the Collaboratory because it means it's time to prepare for our annual Recycled Baseball tournament!  This year, our entire Related Arts team worked together to prepare for different aspects of this event!  It was true collaboration at its finest!  A huge shout-out to Jane Francis, Caryn Smith, Will Flake, and Roberta Tursi for being such an amazing #TigerStrong team!

Recycled Baseball is a game that our students helped to create that transforms recycled materials, such as paper towel rolls, egg cartons, and bottle caps, and upcycles them into baseball gear!  The rules of the game are just like the rules of baseball.  However, every piece of equipment and gear (bats, balls, bases, gloves, uniforms, etc.) has to be made from a recycled material.  The only additional material outside of the recycled materials that the students can use is duct tape.  

Our fourth graders get the honor every year to design the equipment that the rest of the school will use during the Recycled Baseball tournament, and they worked so hard designing, creating, and improving all types of gear!  Our Cub Time kiddos in Art and Library were able to design posters for the event as well!

This year, the tournament took place the day before Spring Break (since Earth Day fell during our Spring Break this year).  We also had a special surprise for our students.  

Our TES Green Team decided to try and have a special guest come and join us for our Earth Day Recycled Baseball Extravaganza!  We reached out to the Philadelphia Phillies, who support a "Red Goes Green" initiative, so we knew they were just as eco-friendly and Earth-conscious as we are!  We were able to organize a guest appearance from the one and only Phillie Phanatic, co-sponsored by the Tabernacle Home and School Association and the Tabernacle Education Association!  It was such an incredible surprise for our students, and they were so proud to show off the gear they designed!

We held a special assembly out on the baseball field in the morning with the Phillie Phanatic as a kick-off to our Recycled Baseball Tournament.  Some of our fourth graders took on some of our teachers in the first Recycled Baseball game of the day, and even the Phillie Phanatic was able to join in and play!  Everyone had a blast!  It was a beautiful day to spend in the great outdoors with some amazing people and their amazing creations!  

Collaboratory Coding

The past month in the Collaboratory has been a whirlwind!  We have been exploring the world of coding, and it has been so much fun to see what our kiddos can accomplish!  

Our youngest learners took a hands-on approach to coding.  We love our Whole Body Coding Challenge, and it's a great way to introduce key coding vocabulary terms like command, loop, and debug.

Once students have become comfortable with more coding language, they are able to apply their learning to some of our favorite coding gadgets, like Code-a-Pillar and Code-and-Go Robot Mouse!

Students even got to create some more advanced algorithms with other devices.  Students loved using Coji, our Emoji Coding Robot!  Students even got to create a Lego algorithm for one of our little critters!

One of the greatest new additions to our Collaboratory Coding adventure has been these awesome Hands-On Coding Blocks!  You can check them out here:   https://www.handsoncoding.org/. They are the perfect transitioning tool for when students are moving from coding with manipulatives to coding on computer programs.  They truly prepare students for what digital coding looks like and how it works.  A huge shout-out to their creators:  Marcos Navas (@mrnavas), Laura Fleming (@LFlemingEDU), and Joann Presbrey (@JoannPresbrey).  They are my coding role models, and I am grateful for their constant support!

Our student programmers LOVED the digital coding portion of our unit!  Our younger learners explored coding on the iPads, while our older learners were able to use their own laptop devices.  We had a blast working through different courses on Code.org!  We even had some fun opportunities for pair programming!

I think we have some future programmers and software developers on our hands!