Rube Goldberg Contraptions — The Early Learning Community First-Second Grade

This week our engineers worked in teams to design Rube Goldberg contraptions. A Rube Goldberg contraption is a chain reaction that accomplishes a simple task in a complicated way. Each team was challenged to design a contraption with at least three steps, that deposited a ball into a cup at the end. This challenge provided students with an opportunity to learn and practice several skills. First, students had to practice collaborating in an assigned team. They needed to take others’ ideas into account and assertively share their own ideas. Second, this task provided students with ample opportunities to practice grit and resilience. None of the contraptions worked correctly the first try! Instead, engineers had to make adjustments, try new ideas, and problem solve issues that arose. Lastly, this experience gave students a chance to explore foundational physics concepts such as force, motion, gravity. Many teams are close to completing the challenge and students will be sharing their contraptions with the group next week!

In math, both grades are beginning geometry lessons that will focus on shapes and then measurement. We read a book called Grandfather Tang’s Story and learned that tangrams are ancient Chinese puzzles that are still used today. Tangrams begin with a square that is partitioned into seven shapes, or tans. People can those shapes to create their own pictures and to tell stories. Students created several interesting tangram shapes. They also solved tangram challenges where they were given a picture, such as a storm cloud, and had to create that same picture using all seven tans without any overlapping. They had to manipulate and rotate the shapes to solve the puzzle. This too required persistence. Students used geoboards and rubber bands to create shapes and use geometry terminology.

On Friday mornings Steven’s dad, Mr. Greg, works with small groups of second graders on completing engineering activities. The first group finished building and testing their mini vacuum cleaners this week and got to share those with the group.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve received several Flat Stanley updates. Several of these updates are quite lengthy and full of interesting information. We’ve been slowly reading and discussing these updates while admiring photos from around our country and the world. We started learning a song called Fifty Nifty United States to help us remember the state names. We also continued our Charlotte’s Web read aloud. We are excited to see a performance of Charlotte’s Web at our local theater next month. Our first grade readers have been practicing reading their buddy books with good fluency and expression. Many second grade reading groups have been reading Scholastic magazines or new chapter books.