January 19th - 22nd

This Week's World of Treasure Slide Show

This week's slideshow is brought to you by Dija, Jayda, and Kailey from the Penticton grade 1 - 3 class (link)

Paper Table Building Challenge

The Penticton grade 5s had their first building challenge of the year.  Their task was to build a table using only the following materials:
8 sheets of newspaper
1 sheet of cardboard 8"x11" (cereal box cardboard)
masking tape

Their paper table had to be at least 20 cm tall and had to support a heavy textbook.  Prior to building their tables, we talked about how rolling the newspaper into tight tubes makes it fairly strong.  It is interesting seeing the different designs the students came up with.  The students worked in pairs or groups of three.  Agreeing on how to build the table and sharing tasks equally can be a challenge, but they all handled things quite well.  All of the groups were able to get their tables to hold one textbook.  Many of the students took up the challenge to see if they could strengthen their tables so that they could support multiple textbooks.  You won't believe how much some of the tables held!  Check out the photos below (link).  I love how excited the kids are with their creations.

5 Card Photo Stories

This week the Penticton grade 1-3 class tackled 5 Card Photo Stories for the first time.  How it works: I show the group 5 images, and then each student comes up with a story that involves all 5 images.  Prior to creating their stories we discuss what makes a good story.  This class really got into it, many of them wanting more time, so they'll be finishing them off next week.  The Summerland ASPIRE group also did this activity and they knocked my socks off (again!) with their amazing stories!  

My Favourite Thing!

The Penticton grade 4s played 'My Favourite Thing!'  It is a drama / storytelling activity where students are given an object and asked to make up a story on the spot explaining why it is their favourite thing.  Some of the objects used were a fox hand puppet, a plastic coat hanger, and a crystal ball.  We had stories involving lasers, aliens, aliens with lasers, aliens playing ping pong, Dr. Who, aliens and Dr. Who and much much more.  Honourable mention: Graham's Italian coat hanger hat story.  I'm not even going to try and explain it, you'll just have to trust me that it was hilarious (and that it didn't involve aliens).

MaKey MaKey

The ASPIRE and AIM classes used the MaKey MaKey kits.  With these kits students can turn various items into computer keys.  In the photo below Iain is using a banana as a space key.

We've also hooked people up to the MaKey MaKey and then opened up a piano program on the computer; when you touch each person a different note sounds on the piano!

Thank you for taking the time to check out a few of the things that we have been up to... This Week In Gifted!