Today the 5th graders learned the basics of neurons and how the nervous system works. Students thought about the question of "how fast is a thought?" and developed their own entertaining demonstrations of how sensory and motor neurons send signals through the body and the brain.

This afternoon, we applied this understanding to learning about neuroplasticity and how, with practice, we can grow our brains' capacity and speed. Students identified things that they are good at and bad at. They reflected how practice and failure helped them to get better at skills and created rough drafts of weirdly personal inspirational posters encouraging themselves to not give up on something that they currently see themselves as bad at.

I also must be having trouble getting all of my synapses to fire today, because I almost entirely spaced taking photos today! Whoops!

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