This week is (National) Engineering Week. We had two engineers from 3M come visit our school to talk about engineering and do a project with the 5-8th graders. They brought a bunch of 3M goodies with them... a huge box of tape (used in the project), extra paper/binder clips, and gift bags for the teachers! Woohoo! Waterproof band-aids, post-it notes, command hooks (both purple and clear!), a window cleaning set of cloths, earplugs, and of course tape. I was planning to leave most of it at school, but after seeing the variety of things I think I'm going to take it home. I had no idea 3M made so many different products!
The kids had fun with the engineers too. Their task was to use 10 pieces of computer paper and a roll of tape to make something that could hold up books. They earned points for creativity, cost (amt. of materials used), how many books it could hold (load), time to build, and how tall the (paper) structure was. I took some pretty cool pictures. It was interesting to see what designs they came up with. I think the most books the paper held was 30. My favorite group got theirs to hold 19 before it fell and they spent the rest of the time trying to come up with a better way of stacking books. They didn't just put the books flat on top of one another; they had some in triangles with other books resting on the spines (like a house of cards). This group got first in three or four categories, but ended up in a tie for 3rd because of how tall the structure was. Bummer.
It's kind of funny because we did a variation of this activity yesterday for 7th and 8th grade science. They were trying to make the tallest building they could out of 10 sheets of paper and 2ft of tape. Everyone had grumbled about the small amount of tape... so they were extra happy today to get a whole roll. One group used a whole roll of tape on their tower today!
Other outstanding things of today: we got to walk over to chapel! This was the first time it was sunny/nice enough to walk over since before Christmas! The 5th graders were actually excited to do Mystery Class today. They got a little confused on filling out the graphs. Eventually we got it kind of figured out. We ran out of time. Hopefully we have school tomorrow so they can keep working on it. This blizzard warning isn't happening at a great time, though I guess there is never a good time for a blizzard. Everyone I've talked to keeps saying the blizzard is going to have 3-7in. of snow and 40mph winds. Joe completely buried himself in his tank. I walked in after leading the 5th graders out to the bus and he was nowhere to be found! So he knows something's coming. I just don't know. When I look at the NOAA weather site, it doesn't look like it will be that bad... although my knees were achy yesterday and that generally means a storm is coming.
I'm still going to do my grocery shopping/library trip tonight, just in case.
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