Launching Rube Goldberg Unit
/This morning we noticed that some of our tadpoles have grown back legs! Our tadpoles are much bigger than they were last week. This week during choice time our mathematicians are practicing their coin counting and making change using the following apps: Motion Math Pizza and OSMO Pizza. Other mathematicians are practicing their math facts using the apps Mathmateer and OSMO Genius Numbers. This morning Pod 2 finished reading a biography about Beverly Cleary called Just Like Beverly. Several readers chose to read a Time for Kids magazine issue about NASA. During outside time we planted more lupine and milkweed in our meadow area. We got to watch bumblebees visiting the lupine that was already growing in the meadow. We noticed that some of the lupine is taller than us! Nora found a beautiful spiderweb covered with dew drops. A couple other student scientists found a leaf covered with interesting “blobs”. They speculated that the blobs could have been eggs, poop, or seeds. This morning we kicked off our Rube Goldberg mini-unit. We examined some of Mr. Goldberg’s machine drawings. Then we watched a video about creating your own Rube Goldberg contraption. For added inspiration we watched an incredibly complex OK Go Rube Goldberg Machine video. Then students made teams and began planning their own Rube Goldberg style contraption that would contain three or more steps, and would culminate in knocking over a Lego character at the end. Tomorrow we will start building our contraptions. In reading today students revisited their genre graphs to analyze how they are doing reading books from a variety of genres. Several reading groups made goals for the week that focus on expanding their genre selection this week. Other reading groups began using genre graphs for the first time. We went on a tour of our classroom library to see where we could find all different types of books. We also met in peer review groups at writing time and continued our Inspiring Individuals research projects.
