It was a quieter week with a couple of learners out, but we had a great time at Acton nevertheless.
Making Learning Compelling and FUN!
As you know, our team attended the annual Acton Owner’s Conference a couple of weekends ago. It was great to learn from other owners and experienced guides. Our goals for heroes in the elementary studio is that they love learning and can get along with others. A key takeaway from the conference was that we can do that by fostering an environment where children are doing important work plus playing lots of challenging games. The latter, in particular, fosters that love of learning.
So, we’ve been looking around and seeing where we can inject more fun and challenging games to entice learners to love a subject without even realizing it. One area where we would like to incorporate this “gamification” is into math.
To that end, I have compiled a wish list of games, games and more games. We’ve crowdsourced these from other Actons who use these during Friday rewards, free time, and create “math centers” that can be used during core skills.
You will also see Civ games, Strategy games, Financial Literacy games, Spatial games and puzzles on that list. Some of you have asked me how you can help the school and this would be one way if you would like to contribute a game that resonates with you and what you want for your child(ren). We would be happy with new or used materials!
PS – over the summer we will create a makerspace donation list of household items. I just need some time to go through next year’s quests and do a rough inventory the makerspace 🙂
Writers’ Workshop – Pitch a Field Trip
The children critiqued each other’s pitches, provided feedback for revisions. Next week they will edit and practice their pitches. There are two options for the field trip that they determined and researched within parameters: Henry Vilas Zoo or Wingra Boats. The children will vote in two weeks on which they prefer! This is certainly a great exercise in persuasive writing 🙂 Note: they will travel to the location via walking and bus.
Quest – Newton’s Physics of Toys
This week we learned about buoyancy by building a raft and maximizing the amount of weight it could hold. The heroes were inspired by a short video we watched of a survivalist building a raft from inflated garbage bags and large tree branches (apparently garbage bags have many wonderful survival uses, so be sure to pack them next time you are wandering in the wilderness). The heroes used balloons for their design and as a result, were extremely successful is loading their raft with pennies!
They also explored elasticity and Hooke’s law by building a rubber band rope and attaching weights to it. At different weights (number of pennies), they measured how far the rubber band stretched. Based on their findings, and knowledge of Hooke’s law, they were given a length to achieve, and predicted and tested the number of pennies (weight) needed to achieve that length. The team was successful getting to a stretched length of 17.5″ on one try!
After each challenge, the children complete a reflection on the challenge where they dive more deeply into, and strengthen their understanding of, the physics concepts at play. This week, the concepts were buoyancy, displacement and Archimedes’ Law of Floatation, as well as elasticity and Hooke’s law. The reflections ask them to consider what they did and observed, what worked, what didn’t, and to put these physics concepts into their own words.
Phys Ed
The heroes are learning about different body systems by using them and experiencing them. For instance, exploring “proprioception” by standing on a trampoline and catching and throwing a ball. They’ve also been exploring hand-eye coordination, muscular strength, muscular endurance and the vestibular system.
The heroes also came up with guidelines for creating their cooperative game:
- Ask heroes if it’s too hard before committing to a part of the game.
- Try different ideas before deciding what to incorporate.
- Make it so every hero wants to participate.
- It uses a ball for a portion of the game.
- It uses a movement we’ve practiced over the last 3 weeks.
- No one gets hurt.
So that is something they will be working on for the next few weeks.
Music
The children seem to be really enjoying music! Ms. Christa brought in chimes this week and they are learning music theory through exploration. Ms. Christa has taught Montessori music, so we really like her experiential approach while also combining the fundamentals of music reading and composing.
Friday Reward
Our Friday reward was to play with toys that utilize elasticity. So the children played with kinetic sand and Play-Doh. The young sensory seekers enjoyed this very much!
