0 Right in the thick of it!

A lot has been going on in the SEAM lab lately!  For one thing, Mrs. Davis is now on maternity leave, and we expect to hear about her good news any day now!  In her absence, allow me to introduce Ms. Bethany Gwin, who will be taking over for Mrs. Davis on her scheduled days.  Ms. Gwin is a December graduate of Metro State and holds a brand new elementary teaching license.  She completed her student teaching last semester in 4th grade with Mrs. Sapena and is excited to kick off her teaching career here in SEAM.  You may know her from the BASE program.  We're very happy to have her joining us in the SEAM lab.  If you see her in the halls, be sure to say hi!

Also, we're right in the thick of our engineering projects now, and the kids seem to be enjoying the process quite a bit.  Our fourth and fifth graders have become quite the experts on electrical circuits and have been studying schematic diagrams as well.  Some of the rotations have begun the process of imagining and planning possible designs for an alarm circuit.  

In third grade, the students have been testing out the effectiveness of various materials as thermal insulators.  We've completed a controlled experiment in which they measured changes in air temperature over time with the materials insulating cups in an ice bath.  Now that we have our results, we're ready to begin planning out what we might use in our own solar ovens!  

Our first and second graders really seem to understand the pollination process and its importance in the natural world.  They've tested out various materials to determine which ones make effective hand pollinators, and are now ready to engineer hand pollinators for various flower types.  

And our kinders?  They've been busy, too!  They've been working on becoming quite independent on the computers, learning to open a program, navigate the tools within it, and close it down all on their own.  They've also been using various engineering materials to come up with their own creative designs, all while focusing on collaboration and teamwork. To enrich their wood and paper science curriculum, the full-day kinders also learned about how paper is made and then created and tested out paper airplanes!  

We're going to be quite busy in SEAM for the remainder of the school year.  Stay tuned for more updates and pictures!