3rd grade seminar updates

Week of Feb. 17: Students were introduced to the seminar and did a brain warm up. We talked about two of the 16 Habits of Mind that we will focus on in this class: Persisting and Thinking Flexibly.

Week of Feb. 24: We discussed the definitions of pattern and sequence. Students created their own patterns and shared them with a small group. We did a paper folding activity and recorded our data in a table and made predictions about the patterns in the table.

Weeks of March 2 and 9: Students listened to the story, "The King's Chessboard," during which they made predictions and completed a data table about the rice the king gave to the wise man. When the story was over, students were given their only homework for the seminar: to determine exactly how many grains of rice were promised. The number will be HUGE and students are able to use a calculator. If someone at home wants to help, that is fine, as long as the students use the calculator and write the numbers on their sheet. After that we started to work with shapes made out of five squares that follow certain rules as to how they can be put together.

Affective

For about three weeks in January students who will be invited to participate in at least two of the three CogAT-themed classes (verbal, quantitative, non-verbal), based on CogAT and/or MAP scores, will be included in the affective seminar. During this class we will get to know each other a little bit, as well as talk about our strengths and learn about the parts of the brain. It's important that we exercise our brains and challenge them so we can grow as learners.

Week of Oct. 28: Students came for our first session this week. Most of our time was spent learning about expectations and procedures, as well as learning our first brain warm-up: Q-Bitz. With partners, the students also created a paper bridge and we tested them to see how many rulers they would hold.

Week of Nov. 4: Students had the chance to make changes to their bridges from last week before we tested them again. After that I had several different paper bridges to test and students made their hypothesis about how many rulers each would hold. They also recorded their observations for each bridge.

Week of Nov. 11: We completed our testing of various paper bridges and looked at what was strong about them and where their weak points were. Kits were assigned and some students began to build a square, triangle, and arch. Those shapes will be tested next week during class, and then it will be time to build the first K'Nex bridge!

Week of Nov. 18: Squares, triangles, and arches were built, tested, and discussed. We watched a video of Galloping Gertie, the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge that collapsed. Students started to build their first bridge. When we meet again after the long weekend they will learn how we test bridges in this class.

Week of Dec. 2: Short span bridges have been built and students learned about tension and compression. Then the testing began! Many groups finished testing their bridges and are starting to build their long span structure. Those groups who haven't started or are not quite done testing will continue with this next week.

Week of Dec. 16: Students have made their truss bridges and are now designing their own bridge. The goal is to build one strong enough to hold as heavy of a load as possible! Our final week of building and testing will be the first week back in January.