Innovation Day 2012

This year, our class participated in Innovation Day!  This was a project day... and each student got to decide what they wanted to learn and how they would share what they have learned with others.  The idea of Innovation Day comes from an Australian company's tradition known as Atlassian FedEx Day.  You can read about it on their website.  (There is a great TED video that discusses problem solving and creativity at that website, if you have a moment to watch it!)  For Innovation Day, each child gets to select a topic to learn more about.  They can really choose anything at all that 1) can be learned about in one day at school; and 2) they have to be able to create something original to show what they have learned.

Today, the students came in prepared to learn, collaborate, and create at school!  Parents, administrators, and teachers walked through our room as we we working on our projects.  At the end of the day, each student had created something to share what they had learned with others.  The sky really was the limit!

These are the projects the students created:

• Building a website
• http://innovationday2012.weebly.com/
• http://innovationdayproject.weebly.com/index.html
• Create a Pac Man game using Scratch
• Design a mod for Minecraft
• Original song using GarageBand
• Animoto of models of buildings all over the world
• Research organic foods and make an organic salad
• Build a model of the Eiffel Tower
• Create a drawing of a potential 4th PowerPuff girl
• Build a solar powered car
• Learn to play a song on a guitar
  

What a great day!

Kindness and Care

This month, the value our class focused on was Kindness and Care.  Maryam A presented the glogster presentation below.  I hope you enjoy it!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Omar A. was the ambassador for the month of April!  This month's value was respect.  Here is the presentation he put together to teach our class all about how to show respect.  Be sure you check out the video.  Our class loved it!

Kindness and Care

Our final Value of the Month trait is Kindness and Care.  Please help our ambassadors, Meha and Maryam, to come up with inspiration for their Glogster presentations on this topic!

Observing and Labeling Leaves

Fifth Grade Orange had a great time looking for these leaves on our playground and analyzing them using "techie" tools.  Below you can see how the students used an iPad app called Skitch to label the 3 main types of leaves. Each are characterized by the number of main veins used to transport water and nutrients to leaf.

Created By Maryam K.

Created By  Maryam A.

Created By Barien

Problem Solving with iPads

For one of our projects, the students used an iPad app for Singapore Math Bar Models.

We wrote our own complex, multi-step word problems and then used the iPad app to create a visual representation of our bar models.

Here are some of our favorites!  Enjoy!

Created By Maryam K.

Created By Barien

Created By Mohamed

Created By Meha

Respect is the Value of the Month

Here is our class Wallwisher brainstorm for the month of April.  The value of the month is Respect.  Please add a sticky note to help Omar A. come up with his presentation on Respect.  Thank you!