Over the last few weeks, second graders have been working on a design challenge inspired by the book Horton Hatches the Egg. In that story, there is an elephant who sits on top of an egg waiting for the mother bird to return. The students' challenge was to build a nest that could protect an plastic Easter egg when "Horton" (a gallon jug of water) sat down on top of it. They came up with many creative ideas and demonstrated great teamwork!
In first grade, we read the book Rosie Revere, Engineer and talked about this month's life skill, perseverance. In the story, Rosie gets discouraged when her flying machine crashes, but her aunt teaches her that "the only true failure comes if you quit." This week, first graders were shown how to create their own flying machine. Ms. Ricter demonstrated how to build the base model and then encouraged them to make modifications to the design.