Some Concrete Examples

Here are a few of the things that we did... This Week In Gifted!

Once Upon A Time

During Circle this week we played a storytelling game called Once Upon A Time.  Each person wrote a noun on a piece of paper.  One person started the story by randomly drawing a piece of paper and including that noun in their sentence which began, "Once upon a time...".  The next person drew another slip of paper and added to the story by adding another sentence including the new noun.  The final story was often very strange!

Architecture

The Pantheon--a giant egg?

Most of the classes continued their exploration of the influence of geology on ancient architecture.  We learned about the advances of the ancient romans due to their access to volcanic ash and volcanic rocks.  They were able to make mortar using ash and lime and later they invented concrete by adding rock fragments to the mortar.  Concrete had many advantages as a building material.  We also looked at the the benefits of the arch and the dome, which the Romans used extensively and usually built using concrete.  In particular we learned about the amazing Pantheon!  It's dome has a diameter of 43 meters and for 1000 years was the largest dome of its kind.  It was built using a variety of volcanic rocks of varying density in the concrete: basalt for the bottom parts of the structure, tuff a bit higher up and extremely lightweight pumice in the concrete of the dome itself.

To further reinforce the idea that domes are very strong we did an activity with a raw egg.  The students were challenged to hold the egg in their palm, wrap their fingers around the egg and squeeze really really hard.  No one was able to break the egg!  Although the Penticton primary group hasn't tried this activity yet, so who knows, perhaps one of them has the strength to do it!

Scratch Programming

Part of the Penticton primary class coding away.

All of the classes continued learning more about computer programming using Scratch.  Some of the students did the activity Debug It! where they were asked to debug 5 scratch programs that weren't working as they should.  Other classes learned how to create code to reset their programs (e.g. if they create a character who walks across the screen, the next time the program runs they need to make sure the character starts from the correct starting point again).  They also learned how to make one sprite (character) respond to another by using the 'broadcast message' and 'when I receive message' blocks.  Some of the students used these skills to program conversations between characters.  Below are a couple of examples of student programs involving conversations between sprites.

By Finn.

By Ellen.

  All of the students are creating interesting programs and they are very enthusiastic about using Scratch!

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