Today, the 5th graders who made it to class were able to present their stomata experimental design projects to the class. As usual with presentations, they also practiced giving gentle, specific, and productive feedback to their peers.

After presentations, the students reflected on their work in the their Book Creator portfolios. I recommend that families have their student lead them through their portfolios once per quarter as our portfolios are the GATE version of a report card, with a heavy emphasis on self-reflection.

I absolutely cannot wait for the next quarter when we start our drone unit!!! Drone Blocks has made their online drone simulator free for the month of December, so I highly recommend 5th graders mess around learning how to use block coding to program the drones. We will be using the Drone Block apps to program our drones, but the simulator is only available to us for December.  The Minimal or City environments are best suited for practice without access to the full curriculum suite.