Engineering - Solar Ovens

Over the past few weeks the children and I have been learning about how engineers solve problems.

The engineering process that your children should be familiar with:

IMAGINE - What would the world be like if we used less power?  What could we do to use less power and energy?  Maybe we could use the power from the sun to make a solar oven?

PLAN - What materials will be useful?  What impact will these materials have on the environment?  Write down some materials we could use.  Draw a picture of what it could look like.

CREATE - Make it.

TEST - Try it out.  Write down the results.  Analyze and discuss.

IMPROVE - What could I do differently to make it work better next time?

After planning their design, children went about creating their solar oven. 

Team work was important.

Everyone had a job to do.

Putting the plan into action.

Make it the best you can.

A few finishing touches.

It is easy for the children to be focused on a project like this one.

Finding some material.  Think about the impact on the environment.

Taking shape.

Let's use the sun to make our ovens as hot as possible.

Warming up!

Recording results.

Getting the angles right.

Discussing the results and thinking about how we can make it better.

Realistic Fiction Writing

Realistic Fiction Writing

Over the past few weeks the children have been using what they learned during our PERSONAL NARRATIVE writing unit to help them develop a more complex style of writing - Realistic Fiction.  

Modeling engaging fiction stories are crucial.  We read a short chapter book called Oggie Cooder by Sarah Weeks.  The story had good character development and story problems.  We analyzed this book closely while enjoying the story together.  

The next task was to use what we learned from listening to the book and using specific writing crafts in our own stories.  Children were taught a variety of ways to plan their story.  The most useful, I believe, is planning by story mountain.  Please ask your child about this method.

Some students working together using the story mountain strategy to plot a story we read together.

By analyzing short stories and how the problem in the story increasingly became more intense guides children when they plan their individual story ideas.

Below are the teaching points I wanted to teach the children about writing realistic fiction:

Ways to find ideas for realistic fiction.

Ways to plan a story with a problem and solution.

Ways to craft an effective lead and effective ending.

Ways to add detail including:

Specific character actions
Showing not telling
Information about setting
Interesting words and strong verbs
Using bit-by-bit storytelling to stretch scenes across a page
Exploding a moment

Balancing character thoughts, talking, actions, feelings, and description.

Showing that the character changed or learned something.

We will record our stories on the blog next week.  I will let you know when they are ready to read.