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!