Ecstatic about Electricity!

Before I get carried away on how much fun we've been having with electricity, I have to give you a glimpse of our adventures with Maglevs. 

To finish our magnetism unit the students built their own maglev cars and this is no simple task. They tackled the challenge and did a great job!

Some students used pennies as weights to help the car balance better.

Electricity

After learning a little about electricity the students made their own potato batteries! 

They had their own voltmeters to check how many volts their potato batteries were producing.

I challenged them to get more and more volts and they got clever by cutting their potatoes and even joining their circuits together with other classmates.

For Thanksgiving, the All-Stars did a research project on the First Thanksgiving. They each presented their information to the class. We were lucky to have Lorenne's grandfather come to the school and show us a replica of the Mayflower and teach us some of the history.

Math has been all about different operations with DECIMALS. To kick off adding and subtracting decimals the students had to figure out what they could order at Subway with a $6 budget.

They hardly realized they were doing difficult math because they were having so much fun.

It's hard to tell in this picture, but the students had to create a circuit that matched a circuit that I drew on the board with schematic symbols. They all know the schematic symbols for: a wire, a battery, and a light.

A very fun STEM activity we did this week was making snowflakes. They had to "buy" their supplies and stay within a $6 budget. It was great to see them using Math and Engineering in this project. 

Making snowflakes in PJ's...doesn't get much better than that!