New this Week

Even though it is the week before Thanksgiving break, we have many new enrichment activities taking place at Laurel Mountain.

This week, I will be starting new Primary Education Thinking Skill (PETS) lessons in first and second grade.  In first grade, we will start to talk about Isabel the Inventor, who uses divergent thinking.  She loves to brainstorm and think of new ideas.  Ask your first grader what tool Isabel uses to help her brainstorm.  In second grade, we will continue learning about convergent thinking with Dudley and Sybil.  In this lesson, the students have to figure out the patterns in some grids using visual clues.  These lessons will be taking place this week and the week after Thanksgiving.

Mrs. Hein's fifth grade class started their NXT Mindstorm lessons today.  I have really gotten these lessons down to a science, since is the fourth class I have worked with.  Today, I did the introductory lesson about robots and the students started to construct their "Star Trek" doors.  The Heroes did a super job of working together in teams and taking turns building and gathering parts.  I was very impressed.

Finally, I started working with Mr. Hance's class on the LEGO lessons focusing on gears.  We discussed input, output, drive gear, driven gear and gear ratio.  Then, the class began to build a model of a gear. Tomorrow we will discuss the gear they built using the LEGO Educational Kits and continue to build other gears.  We will then move on to pulleys.  Eventually, the students will get to build a "leaf sweeper" and do some a variety of trials to see which gears and pulleys make the sweeper work the best. 

Continuing to develop the whole child....