Join the Target Teachers for a Pancake Breakfast!!
Where: Annex Room 3015
When: Thursday, December 6 at 7:30 A.M.
Starting Bid: $25 with 6 students winning
Teacher Participation: All 3 Target teachers (Ms. Boucher, Mrs. Christofoli, and Mrs. Bullard)
Along with the weekly convergent thinking activities such as logic puzzles and Hands-On Equations, we are doing many fun unit activities that require divergent, more convergent, and evaluative thinking as well! By creating the pasta bridges and movable bridges, students are discovering what it takes to make a bridge strong enough to withstand various loads as well as inclement weather. Students are reflecting on how they built their bridges, whether or not it was effective, and what they would do differently.
Your children also visited the following website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/bridge/basics.html#beam
This is a wonderful interactive site in which they can learn many things about bridges such as the forces that act upon them, the various materials used in building bridges, what type of bridge should be built in certain land and waterforms, etc. We highly encourage you to visit this site with your children as there is so much valuable information about bridges that would make a fun discussion.
Please see the homework post below that was posted on September 25. If your child has not yet come up with a personal goal, they should bring it in next week. In addition, your children will be given an assignment entitled Ultimate Connections Vocabulary. They are to choose ten of the words on the given list and create one of the suggested products. This assignment is due the week of October 15th.
As always, if you have any questions, please contact your child's Target teacher by clicking on her name to the right of this blog.
Our fourth and fifth graders continue to use their convergent thinking while solving algebraic problems with Hands-On Equations and using clues to solve logic puzzles. They are getting practice with divergent thinking writing narratives using personification of inanimate objects. The Target teachers were very impressed with the narratives in which our students personified a bridge! They used originality, elaboration, flexibility and fluency in their writing and really let their creativity shine!
Our students have also been using their evaluative thinking in Target. Each week they are building various types of bridges using provided materials. Your children are discovering the shapes and architecture that make bridges strong as well as the forces that act upon them. To reinforce these concepts, students will also be navigating a website that will help them learn how to judge which bridges should be built in certain situations. They must have their flash drives for this lesson, as they will be creating a short presentation with the information they've learned.
