Paper Airplanes

The class learned how to fold two types of paper airplanes in Ms. Angie's STEAM class today!

Bioluminescent Jellyfish

We are learning all about jellyfish this week! We first started by reading about them and making a bubble chart. 

Then we learned about what bioluminescence is and made our very own glow in the dark jellyfish, thanks Ms. Angie for the idea and help!

STEM Activity with Eggs

Ms. Angie had the kids do a great activity in their STEM lab, they filled eggs with different objects and estimated how far they thought they would roll down a ramp.  Then they rolled it down the ramp and compared it to their estimate.  The kids did such a great job with this activity! 

More Arduino Boards

Here are some more pictures of us working on programming our arduino boards. We also played the board game Robot Turtle to learn more about programming and coding!

Arduino Boards

Our principal, Dr. Locke, is helping our class learn how to program arduino boards! We will use our knowledge to program lights to blink at different speeds.  In addition, we are learning about circuits through our Snap Circuit boards and we made a human circuit using this energy ball!

And here is us experimenting with the arduino boards!

Ice Sculpture Day

We had our ice sculpture day today, which is a Brighton kindergarten tradition.  I learned some tricks from last year and modified our morning a little for this year.  Instead of doing a whole class ice sculpture activity, I made ice sculptures a station.  All the rest of our stations were ice themed and the kids had a blast!  I loved that instead of it being a 20 minute activity, we were able to do a whole hour of STEM ice activities. 

Ice Caves: We discussed what happens when salt is poured over ice, then the kids tested it out.  They poured salt and dropped liquid watercolors onto ice to make tunnels and caves!

Oil and Ice Painting: We learned that water and oil do not like each other! We painted paper with oil, then spread a ice cube made with paint on top.  The paint puddled on top of the oil and slid around as a result. 

Ice Sculpture: We learned that salt lowers the freezing point when poured on ice, that is what makes two pieces of ice stick together.  We had fun playing with brightly colored ice and stacking them up.

Science Paper Experiment

Today we spent our science time working with all different types of paper! Students got to use super absorbent paper to drop liquid watercolor on, draw on different types of paper with different materials (wax, cardboard, thick, thin, etc.), make paper, weave paper and do leaf rubbings.  Our science rotations are busy and messy so I apologize for the lack of pictures!

Engineering Camp

I taught two weeks of summer camp and they were both so much fun! Here are some of the activities that we did during the first week camp I did, which was engineering camp.

On our first day of camp we learned about roller coasters! We played with marble towers, designed our own roller coasters, and planned out an amusement park.  We did an experiment where we spun water around in a cup  in circles. This led to a discussion about Newton’s Laws of Motion and centripetal force.  In the afternoon we made our own roller coasters using pipe foam, marbles, and duct tape.

The second day of camp was all about destruction, which we learned about through Humpty Dumpty themed activities.  The first activity involved putting a Humpty Dumpy paper puzzle back together using bandaids.  We then experimented with dropping eggs in bags of different materials, to see what type of material protected an egg best.  Students used those skills to build a cushion for their egg for an egg drop challenge.

We filled day three with making lots of different types of toys.  Some of the projects included a spinning top and a few different bubble wands.  We then experimented with which type of ingredients made the best type of bubble solution. We also built some towers out of noodles and marshmallows. 

Survivor was the theme for day four.  We made volcanoes out of play dough and decorated them using leaves, dirt, and sticks.  Later in the day we got to make our volcanoes explode using baking soda and vinegar.  We also saw what happened when we put Pop Rocks and vinegar in our volcanoes. Our last project of the day was making a solar oven out of a pizza box, foil, and plastic wrap.  We made s’mores in our solar ovens and talked about the power of the sun.

We had lots of fun on our last day of camp.  We made catapult paper airplanes using rubber bands and also made a paper airplane using a straw.  We measured how far our planes flew and had a paper airplane flying contest!