What do you get when you combine uncooked spaghetti, marshmallows, eggs, and teamwork?  Why,  a lesson in architectural design, of course!   Fifth grade GATE students are currently working on a skyscraper unit and tested their skills at building a spaghetti skyscraper that was required to hold and egg more than 40 cm off of the table.  We completed the webquest at this site!  It was a lot of fun and students learned a great deal about the strength of their structures. 

In GATE 4, we checked out the book by Shel Silverstein called, Don’t Bump the Glump!    After reading, we created our own watercolor paintings and then wrote a poem with adjectives to match the creatures.  Word choice is everything in these poems! 

• Bubble Wrap: $1.00 per sheet
• Clear Tape: $1.79 per roll.
• The cost of causing students to be creative and invent something new out of something old: Priceless.

The Bubble Wrap explosion in our classroom.

Tennis Anyone?

Bubble Book Cover

In each of the GATE classes, students have been putting their best problem solving skills to work in the online game “Fanstastic Contraption.”  With all of this talk about the Invention Convention, we’ve been talking about inventions involving simple machines.  In this game, students have to work to build a virtual contraption that will move the red square into the target zone.   This game taught us that there are many different ways to solve  a problem, that sometimes one simple piece of the puzzle stands between you and a great discovery, and that challenges are fun!

This week in GATE6, students fired up their teamwork skills for a very important event.  By working together, they were able to SAVE FRED!  Fred, the adorable gummy worm, ends up trapped on top of the SS Plastic Cup, a ship that has capsized.   Unfortunately, Fred can’t swim and his beloved life preserver is stuck under the boat.   Using only specialized rescue gear, known in the scientific world as “paperus clipicus,”  students had to team up and save Fred.

NOTE:  No Gummy Worms Were Harmed in This Activity.  (However, a few were later eaten.)

If you’d like to SAVE FRED in your classroom, here’s a link to a word doc that I found using Google.