Tinkering Center
/On Monday students noticed that heavy rainfall had caused our pond to nearly overflow! They decided to work together to create a barricade to prevent flooding incase more rain came. The next day, however, they discover that instead of heavy rainfall we had ice. The ice was particularly beautiful on our metal rain rainchain. Later in the week we ended up with some sunshine and students worked together to clean up our outdoor classroom and restore our pebble border on the edge of the grass. This week we had a lovely friendship celebration on Tuesday and students were delighted to receive kind messages from their classmates. We spent time writing cards to our reading buddies too. Thursday afternoon we took our weekly trip to the library and got to admire our class trout life cycle project hanging on display. We also admired art created by Sea Lion and Whale students. This week during project time students have been working in small groups with a teacher to take apart different devices. Students have been learning how to use various tools correctly and are learning many new vocabulary words, such as circuit board, solder, tinker, frequency, cassette, and amplitude. Yesterday morning we dismantled and examined an old radio/cassette player. We used a microscope to get a better look at some of the pieces. Jace's dad brought in a fancy toolkit for us to use complete with screwdrivers, fasteners, a socket set, Allen wrenches, and handy reference sheets. We discovered that our take apart center works best when we have a ratio of three students to one adult. This ratio allows us to have deeper, more meaningful conversations with students while also helping them learn to use the tools correctly. We plan to continue working with small groups at the take apart center for as long as we have devices to take apart, so feel free to continue sending in old devices that can be taken apart and examined. This afternoon students shared their Inspiring Individual booklets with classmates. Students toasted and cheered as individuals added their newly published books to our classroom library.
