This week, the 4th graders started of by joining in on Lowell's Raise Craze kindness-a-thon! They wrote stealth thank you notes to the custodians who clean the school, and the cafeteria workers who feed them each week. We had fun sneaking through the school to deliver the stick notes of gratitude!

We then spent the morning starting on our teamwork exploration. The students started by brainstorming all of the struggles they have experienced working on teams before. There were... a lot. ha! Teamwork can be particularly challenging for many GATE students who may show various neurodivergent traits and unrealistic standards for teammates. We will be working our way through strategies to combat and overcome these struggles over the course of this year and beyond. 

This week's struggle was when there are disagreements about which idea to choose. As a group, we came up with a list of strategies to use when this problem arises. We also chatted about the nuances that make certain strategies work better depending upon the personalities on the team. Table groups then applied some of the strategies while completing a simple teamwork challenge using the game OuiSi.

In the afternoon, we started to look at what neurons are and how they work. We will continue with this work next week as well. The students also took the brain anatomy post-assessment and enjoyed comparing them to the drawings they drew of the brain's structure at the start of the brain unit. They aren't yet experts, but they've come so far!

UPCOMING: There will be no GATE the week of November 29-December 3.