What fun day of challenge! We started off with a set of squirrel-themed creativity and critical thinking challenges. These ranged from sentence stems that encourage setting perfectionism aside and just saying the first thing that comes to your mind to using deductive reasoning to put a mental puzzle together.  By the end we determined that GATE kids and squirrels might have more in common than one may originally think!

In the afternoon, the students put the Western engineering/design process to work by building Lego bridges across a construction paper river. No Lego bricks were allowed to touch the water, and the bridge was tested for strength by placing pennies into a cup in the center of the bridge. After the bridge failed, students adjusted their design and tried again. It was SO COOL to see the 1st graders start off by thinking the challenge was too easy to saying it was IMPOSSIBLE to finding more success than they could have ever imagined. A few bridges even held between 1-2 pounds!