You know those really annoying fidget spinner-things that children are clutching lately??? I challenged the Seventh Graders to make one for themselves using the materials of their own choosing.
We watched a video of James Dyson talking about his evolution as a designer/inventor and another video of someone making a spinner out of air-dry clay (which I did not provide.) The children experimented with lots of different materials. Some of the spinners worked. Some, not so much!
This week, since several of the Tech classes have been exploring coding this year, I decided to match the experienced coders up with their younger reading buddies for some one-on-0ne coding instruction! SO fun and we will definitely do it again later in the year…
We are thinking of putting together a magazine in which 7th Graders can write about some of the things they are interested in. So, today I asked the children to think about what they wanted to write about….
This week, Sixth and Seventh Graders talked about web site credibility – knowing who the author is and what his/her credentials are; how the site is being funded and who is making the information available; and when was the site published. We looked at Sweet Search– a search engine that is an alternative to Google created for students’ use and vetted by “internet librarians.” We tried an experiment by searching for Hillary Clinton on both Google and Sweet Search to compare search results. There were definitely more Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and other like sites on the Google first page than on Sweet Search, whose citings included the New York Times, Washington Post, Hillary Clinton.com, Politico, and so on.
The children then did some research on topics for their science projects.
Third and Fourth Graders started their typing program.
BookCraft 