Engineering Week at Cannon!

Our big excitement for this week was getting started on Lego WeDo Robotics in class!  Some of the students have been looking forward to this for a long time.  After some introductory puzzles with Ms. Pettit during last Friday's rotations, we got started today building our first project: the lion!  Students followed onscreen directions with their partner, gathered the pieces and followed the steps to build the lion, including connecting it to the laptop.  Then they followed the directions to complete the drag-and-drop program on the screen.  Finally it was time to see if they were successful.  If they typed a on the keyboard, the lion sat up and roared.  If they typed b, it lay down and snored.  Many students had time to make a short video of their lion in action that you can watch on their iPads.  A few even finished with enough time left to modify the program and change the lion's actions or the sound effects.  Everyone was excited and left the media lab looking forward to our next robotics session!  

In these pictures you can see the process they went through and the finished lion.  Check out these looks of concentration as they work!

We had also listened to the story The Most Magnificent Thing earlier this week and created plans for inventions they would like to have to solve a problem of some sort.  Some of the ideas included a robot to bathe kids for parents, a toy washer to clean toys, a garbage picker so the garbage men don't have to pick up the bags themselves, a machine to make noises so little sisters or brothers wouldn't bother you, a freeze ray, a gravity gun, and a flying car.  Today we used Google Hangout to connect with Ms. Read's class at O. C. Taylor and both classes shared their ideas!

Our last big activity for Engineering Week will be some extra building and design time on Friday.  That should be a fun way to wrap a week of fun and learning!

We have read about some famous inventors, practiced the way engineers draw and label plans for their designs, created a design to solve a problem just like other inventors do, followed plans to build something, and tested and fixed things that were not working.  These are some of the things engineers do, but these are also skills that can be applied to anything students want to do in life!

Potato Project Kick-Off

Cannon is embarking on a gardening project this spring to grow potatoes and onions and then donate the fresh produce to a local food bank.  To start things off in 1st grade today each teacher had a different activity and the students rotated to every class during the day.  Mrs. Greuling had a building challenge for students to build a structure that could hold the weight of a potato.  Mrs. Boynton took groups to the garden to plant potatoes and Mrs. Heard took groups and planted onions.  Ms. Pettit took classes to the media lab to introduce the WeDo Lego Robotics (which we will begin next week - but that's a different post!)  In my class we observed some different types of potatoes and talked about words to describe what they looked, felt, and smelled like.

Then we got creative and started to imagine what potatoes might think about, or love, or fear, or wish for...  Students worked on writing potato poems (either about what they had observed or what they could create about those imaginary potatoes) and illustrated their poems.  Here are some potato poets hard at work:

Valentines Fun

Today we started with a fun new story called Here Comes Valentine Cat and then everybody wrote about something or someone they love!  Then in math we reviewed graphs and collected data to make our own - about candy Valentines hearts!  Students sorted their hearts by color, wrote tally marks to show how many of each, then showed those numbers on a graph.  Some students chose picture graphs and some chose bar graphs.  The last task was to write 3 questions that could be answered from their graph.  Here are some students hard at work and some sample work!

This afternoon, of course, it was time for party fun!  

Celebrate Doggy Day!

Our class recently did some research about holidays:  Mardi Gras, Chinese New Year, and Earth Day.  For a final activity, each 1st grade class created our own new holiday.  Our class decided on Doggy Day to celebrate dogs for all the love and help they give people.  We came up with symbols and special events that people could participate in.  And today all the 1st grade classes got together and had a holiday parade to share our holiday creations with the rest of the school.  We carried a banner to show some of the most important ideas about what dogs do for us and what we can do for them!