Projects
Teambuilding
- Values Puzzle: Students brainstorm values they feel should be brought to the classroom in order to ensure a successful and fun year. Examples include: cooperation, diligence, diversity. Each student represents one value with an accompanying image on a larger than life, cardboard puzzle piece. Students then work together to put the puzzle together and the final puzzle is hung above the doors to our classrooms.
- Student Expectation Videos: Instead reading over the syllabus with the students we have broken down the major components of the syllabus into blurbs which will be transformed into short three minute films. Students will work in small groups to produce a entertaining video (whether they are humorous, serious or sad is up to them) which will be shared with the entire team along with every other group's videos.
Math
- Designed for Discussion: Students create a proposal for how our classroom should be arranged. Students create a scaled blueprint of classroom with important features and measurements labeled. Students defend their design choices in writing and present their ideas to the class for group discussion.
- Mystery Mobile Project: Students design a mobile with objects that represent themselves to learn mechanical advantage and algebra.
Science
- Organizational Levels of Life: Partners work to create a 3D model from colored paper to represent the different organizational levels of life. Students share their models and explain the organizational level they were assigned with the entire class.
- Exploring Life Experiment: Students generated a list of qualities that characterized life by comparing many commonly seen items (such as the sun, tree, egg, spider, rocks, etc). Then students observed 5 unknown samples for evidence of life. Students gathered more information about the samples by applying an experimental treatment. Groups were assigned a particular liquid environment, either salt water, sugar water or plain water, with which they submerged their samples and observed over the course of the next 5 days. Their observations helped them to redefine their working definition of life.
