Innovation and Inspiration

Things were shaking in Amanda Haughes' 5th grade class at Forest Hill yesterday!  Amanda was very brave, letting me pilot the Earthquake Engineering challenge in her classroom.  We were originally going to just do a structural building challenge, but with the recent California Earthquake, we wanted to make it more relevant with a real-world problem. We initially gave students a very vague challenge criteria, "You are going to work on building a structure.  You will be given 100 index cards, 1 clipboard, and 1 foot of masking tape."  We did this intentionally to encourage the students to ask questions about the project.  They all wrote at least one question on their graphic organizer and we answered them as a whole class.  This worked out really well, because instead of us explicitly telling them the "challenge rules", students felt ownership over there questions and discoveries. Amanda even let me test out my new Campbell STEAM Challenge graphic...

Today I was able to spend the day in Lindsey Blass' 6th grade class at Campbell Middle School.  Yesterday, students used Google Forms to find out more their classmates.  Lindsey had sent out a link to the Google Form she had created.  Students responded with their birthday month and their height. She then made copies of the survey results summary.  Students were very excited to use the Pie Chart and Percentage Tables that were class-created the day before. The essential question for the day was "How can we display our data in a meaningful way?"  Using Cornell Notes, students later interpreted the data and displayed it on a dot plot.  Students were highly engaged with this real-world summary of data. What a wonderful way to introduce Google Forms, Essential Questions, Dot Plots, Cornell Notes, and Interactive Journals.  Thank you, Lindsey and Room B9!

I always leave CUSD's iTeach inspired and excited for the new school year!  In our district, iTeach is a week-long summer PD focused on integrating technology to further Common Core and STEAM initiatives. This year, we met at Starbucks for our initial meeting!  We were each given a secret mission to focus on while we were there.  My mission was, "How are people grouped?  Are they alone?"  Some other missions were "What is the environment like?  What is sound level?" "What are people ordering?  Are they ordering straight from the menu customizing their order?"  So when we got back to our formal training room, drinks in hand, we were all ready to talk about our secret missions.  Some of our observations were that some people were standing in line alone, others were sitting at couches or tables with a partner or small group, there was background music playing, there were several conversations going on at the same time (but people could st...