Thursday 12 April 2018

Project Work

Here are a few things we have been doing this week in gifted.

Flight Lesson

Students were presented with the following slide show (link).   As we progressed through the slides the students were asked to come up with a hypothesis to explain why the things grouped under the 'Yes' column were grouped together.  As they were presented with more images they revised their hypotheses.  Eventually all of the groups figured out why the 'Yes' items were grouped together -- can you?  Go through the slides slowly and one at a time.



The above activity lead to a discussion about the different types of flight we see in birds.  I asked students to try and notice the different ways that birds fly as they are out and about this week.

Project Work

For the past month students have been busy on their projects.  The slideshow below shows some of the projects students are working on; there are a lot of students using the computer coding program Scratch to create games or animations, but there is also a lot of variety!  If the slideshow isn't showing up for you, or if you'd like it full screen, then click on this link.



Thanks for checking in to see what we've been up to this week!

Saturday 7 April 2018

Spring Update

It's been awhile since I've posted here, so we are long overdue for an update!

This year the theme is flight and the students have been busy learning about different aspects of flight; from flight in nature to human made flying machines.

Last month the grade 3s, 4s and 5s started working on The Big Project!  Students have a lot of choice as long as their project tackles our theme.  Here are some of the projects on the go:
  • Comparing the characteristics of different paper airplane designs
  • Creating computer games with Scratch in which participants will learn about; blimps, or hot air balloons, or jets, or the history of flight.
  • Presenting research on butterflies in the form of a magazine
  • Recreating a newspaper from the late 1700s with stories on major advances in hot air balloons and parachutes
  • Creating a Scratch animation on space travel
  • Designing a luxury rocket
  • Sharing research on drones, other remote control airplanes, travel to Mars and more...
  • Producing a child's picture book about bees
  • Making a model of the Wright Brother's first successful powered airplane    
More on these projects in the upcoming weeks.

The younger students (Thursday afternoon class) have started a timeline on the history of flight as well as learning how to program with Scratch.  The timeline is below--click on the arrows to go through the timeline.  (If you received this post via e-mail, you may have to go here for the timeline to be visible.)




In the last couple of weeks, the students did some activities exploring Bernoulli's Principle.  This principle helps to explain how airplane wings and bird wing provide lift.  For photos of some of these explorations please check out the slideshow below or click on this link.



Thanks for checking out what we've been up to the last little while in Gifted!