Mr. Lusk, Architect

Mr. Lusk, a successful, local architect visited the STEM Academy today to support our students projects.  Our 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade STEM Academy are working on the same projects, but using different geographical areas.  The project question is:

How can we engineer buildings that could withstand natural disasters?

Students have researched the regions' physical and human characteristics, including landforms.  They have also studied the regions weather and natural disasters.  In 3rd grade, students are designing a school building for Henderson County Public Schools in Western North Carolina.  In 4th grade, students are designing school buildings for the 3 different regions of North Carolina.  In 5th grade, we are designing school buildings in the 5 different regions of the United States.  Students have worked extremely hard to research and develop their plan.  They are now using NASA's Engineering Design Process to plan and create models of their school buildings.

Mr. Lusk was able to give students advice about their buildings.  Students developed a list of questions for Mr. Lusk.  He spoke about the importance of following the building code, including fire safety measures, and how to prevent incidents from occurring.  The students were impressed with Mr. Lusk, but he seemed more impressed with the students' critical thinking, behavior, and curiosity.

We appreciate him speaking with us and we look forward to continuing our projects!

SCRIBBLERS club

I have been very excited to be the teacher sponsor of the Dana Scribblers club! 

We meet once per week after school to sharpen our saws by doing something we love... DRAWING!

I am so proud of the beautiful art that the Scribblers have created.  I have enjoyed sponsoring them and can't wait to create more artwork and memories with them!

Christmas Extravaganza Synergizing!

Today, we worked with our accountability buddies in Ms. Raymor's 2nd grade class to design and create poinsettia art work for our Christmas Extravaganza.  We worked as a team and created hundreds of decorations for the gymnasium.  Synergizing at its best!

OUTDOOR ED Fun!

Diving Into the Water... Cycle

Water Cycle

Makaila and Maria were so focused during science today! Way to go!

Inferring the Meaning of Words

For our Junior Great Books story, The Turquoise Horse, we collaborated to infer the meaning of words. We used text clues to help us define unfamiliar words from the story.

Today's Meet and Science

We used Today's Meet today in science to communicate our thinking about heat transfer in various photographs. We found Today's Meet to be a great way to collaborate and share our ideas. We learned a lot from this short activity, and this wasn't even the most important part of our lesson!

Types of Engineering

We've been researching types of engineering in the STEM Academy this week. Each team presented the findings from their research to the rest of the STEM Academy. We voted on which type of engineer we would most like to be when we grow up. We learned a lot about engineering and what qualities are important for each type of engineer.

Matter or Non-matter?

We discussed the properties of matter today after we sorted objects by whether we thought they were matter or non-matter. The activity was eye-opening and helped us to understand the basics of matter in our universe.