Wonderful Multicultural Feast

Every year for Thanksgiving I give an assignment to my students to share a traditional food they make during the holidays.  Then they video themselves or a family member making the food or drink and then if they can, they bring it to share with the class the last day before Thanksgiving Break.  This year was wonderful!  Despite the technical difficulties we had sharing the videos, my students and their families shared some fantastic dishes and fun was had by all.  It was great to see the students' enthusiasm about what they brought and their delight in sharing their traditions.  What a great send off to our vacation!  Happy Thanksgiving!

Question Formation Technique

I went to the GAFE Summit last weekend and went to a session led by Roni Habib.  The focus was on getting kids to lose their inhibitions about formulating questions and just go for it.  It was great and I immediately began thinking about how I could use this with my students.  We have recently embarked on a unit on pollution and I was really wanting my students to think about the impact of pollution on the environment and ask some thought provoking questions that could lead them to a research activity.  The method he shared with us was perfect.  I did it with my students today and the majority of them were focused, followed my directions and came up with some really insightful questions.  Here is a link to the presentation I used.  Before I began the activity I had them get in groups and (as a group) act out being a car, a plane and a zoo.  This got them warmed up to work with the group before they set to work on the tough stuff.  Looking forward to what comes next!

C-STEM and Robotics

Despite the fact that I still don't have the laptops required to teach programming and run our robots, I am jumping in.  We are started by using Roboblockly, so that they could at least program a robot virtually.  What is great about this is that they can view the ch code that corresponds with the block coding.  They are journaling about what they discover about the functio of certain code commands.

I think my next step will be writing code on paper using the color coding in Chide to help them complete the four components of a computer program.  Then we can then test some of their programs using my computer.  I just needed to jump in somewhere.

Hey everyone!
My name is Maria Solis and this is my first ever blog post!  Let's see how this goes!