This weeks engineering building challenge is about bird beaks.  This fits with our study of animal adaptations.  The challenge is using the materials provided, can you build a bird beak that can pick up the most food in one try?  They can not touch the food in any way their their hands. 

We are in the middle of our animal study.  The scholars all picked animals and have researched their animals.  They have built habitats and are working on writing facts for their Thinglink presentations.  Today we are working on food chains.

Wow all of our Three Little Pig Houses were successful.  They really are becoming strong engineers.  Here are all of the houses. 

This week in engineering we are working on The Three Little Pigs Engineering Challenge.  They must use the materials provided to create a house for a pig that an withstand the effects of different wind speeds.  Three of the groups have chosen to use tape and craft sticks for their constructions.  Another group is using sugar cubes. I can not wait to see their final buildings. 

This week in science we started an animal project.  The students will be engineering a habitat for the animal they selected.  This habitat will need to meet the needs of their animal.  They can use supplies from school to build this habitat.  Some of them have already asked if they can add things that they bring in from home.  I am fine with that.  So if they ask for supplies please help them collect them if possible.  They will be working on this project for the next two weeks.  I can't wait to see how they will impress me this time. 

Our engineering challenge for this week was building the tallest free-standing Rapunzel Tower out of paper.  The tower needs to be able to have a braid of hair hanging down on one side.  They were allowed to any kind of paper they wanted.  It is amazing how quickly after first tests they realized that the base was going to make a big difference in this challenge. 

This week in science we are working on patterns in the sky.  Today we went used a model to see how the moon phases happen.  We used a ball to represent the moon, a flashlight to represent the sun and we each got to act as the Earth.  We rotated the moon around Earth and held the sun in a constant location and we observed all the phases in the moon in one full rotation of the person.