Dinosaur Museum!

Our class wants to give a big thank you to our PTA for bringing us the Dinosaur George exhibit!  Students could barely contain their excitement that week and after their visit everyone was eager to share things they saw and learned!  Check out these pictures:

Fairy Tale Engineering

Recently we have been focused on fairy tales during reading and engineering time.  I have read aloud some traditional stories like The Three Little Pigs and students have read and listened to other stories.  We also incorporated some fairy tale building challenges that I got for our class through the Donors Choose program.  With each kit students could practice retelling and acting out the story with the character pieces.  They could also try to design a structure to meet that story's challenge.


Trying to build a house big enough for all three little pigs that the wolf cannot blow down:

Trying to build a bridge that goes over the troll that can hold all three billy goats:

Trying to build a chair that can hold even the biggest of the three bears:

We will be continuing to focus on fairy tales in our next engineering challenge!  You can read more about that on in a future post!

Magnet Discovery Lab

Last week we started our unit on magnets with a visit from the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History's magnet lab.  Students rotated to 4 stations to explore how magnets can push and pull on other objects.  We worked on using some science vocabulary to describe what we did.  Take a look at some scientists in action:

2 magnets can repel to push the car.

The washer is attracted to the magnet.

Kingston made magnets float because they repelled each other.

We tested which materials are attracted to magnets.

Magnets can be used to separate materials if some are attracted to magnets and some are not.

Students tested many objects to see were attracted to magnets.

We also used magnets to pull the marble through the mazes.

Are you strong enough to force the magnets together when they repel each other?