What a beautiful day to be on the roof of the school. Let's get the Annual 4th Grade Egg Drop Challenge started! #STEMinELEM

Students worked through the Engineering Design Process to create egg carrier prototypes that help Farmer Brown deliver his eggs by drones. They did an EGGcellent job and learned so much! #STEMinELEM

As part of their reflection on their Egg Drop Challenge, students were tasked with creating a new design with different materials. Their conversations (and complaints) showed how much they learned from this part of our energy unit!

It was a beautiful day to explore solar cells and energy transfer! #STEMinELEM

I believe in giving students every possible tool to help them be successful. We start each Math unit with "tool making time" and practice using the tools before we ever apply them to our learning and practice. Students can choose what tools work best for them.

I love our school's tradition of Idiom Day on Halloween. And, YES, with Halloween on Thursday and all of the building excitement throughout the week, I might have lost my marbles!

Starting a new Science unit: animal systems/functions. We have tree frogs & turtles in the classroom & added a Chilean Rose Tarantula. We have endoskeleton, exoskeleton, & both covered. Beginning of the week they were terrified. Now they'll miss her over the weekend! #❤️Science

We just wrapped up the "research and share" part of our Indiana Native Americans project - groups were assigned tribes to research, prepare info sharing presentations, and create models that show the info they learned about the tribe. Next step - write compare/contrast essays!

More pictures of Indiana Native American Tribes models

How many different ways can you solve the same problem? I try to help students find/make connections in every subject and they were making them with division word problems this week!

How far will your admin go to hype up students?

One of the best times of the year is here-National Park Project time! We have "traveled" virtually to several parks via recorded sessions but today we had a live session w/Ranger Gillian from Kenai Fjords NP . She taught us so much about glaciers and you can tell she ❤️ her park!

Today's National Park Project tour took us to a live session with a great ranger from ShenandoahNPS. The geology of this park is amazing!

Today we "traveled" to Maine for a meeting with Ranger Lisa from Acadia National Park. She shared info about the park and provided students with amazing examples of rocks and the rock cycle visible all around the park. I don't know how I could do this unit without these ranger experiences!

Today my trading card club kids ripped open some new packs of cards courtesy of Indy Card Exchange. Thank you Andy for making their day. They had some great pulls!

My students ❤️ LEGO building challenges for soft start time. They were so excited when I put Minecraft cards in the basket! They made some creative builds to meet the challenges. I think I heard Jack Black impersonations 100X. #chickenjockey!