As many of you might know by now, our district has adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). NGSS shifts the focus from science classrooms as environments where students learn about science ideas to places where students explore, examine, and use science ideas to explain how and why phenomena occur.A very important component of NGSS is planning units around a big question tied to a puzzling phenomenon. Units center around an anchoring event.....that's where the video comes in. Students need to answer the question: How we can use materials to design a container that best protects eggs from breaking? Leading up to this engineering task, we have been studying different materials and learned that materials have many different properties -- color, texture, strength, flexibility, etc. We have also learned that some materials are better suited for some purposes than others. Today students began planning how they will answer our testable question. They developed a list of potential materials to use and then came up with what properties will make those materials helpful. For example, foil is flexible and durable. Cotton is soft and serves as a cushion. We will then test materials for specific properties and then begin designing our container.
Today the kids insisted I share the video we watched during science on our website....so here it is. Now for the reasoning.... As many of you might know by now, our district has adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). NGSS shifts the focus from science classrooms as environments where students learn about science ideas to places where students explore, examine, and use science ideas to explain how and why phenomena occur.A very important component of NGSS is planning units around a big question tied to a puzzling phenomenon. Units center around an anchoring event.....that's where the video comes in. Students need to answer the question: How we can use materials to design a container that best protects eggs from breaking? Leading up to this engineering task, we have been studying different materials and learned that materials have many different properties -- color, texture, strength, flexibility, etc. We have also learned that some materials are better suited for some purposes than others. Today students began planning how they will answer our testable question. They developed a list of potential materials to use and then came up with what properties will make those materials helpful. For example, foil is flexible and durable. Cotton is soft and serves as a cushion. We will then test materials for specific properties and then begin designing our container. In math we have started Bridges Unit 2. See below for what your child will be learning. Today we learned how to write numbers in expanded form. Expanded Form is a way to write numbers by adding the value of its digits. Example: 300 + 50 + 4 = 354. We talked about how the 5 in the number 354 actually means 5 tens, which has the value of 50. We will soon use expanded form as a strategy to add multi-digit numbers. Below are some random pictures from the last couple of weeks.
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