Exciting things are happening at Moore Elementary School! Brentwood teachers Kate Smeltz, Barbara Girone, Megan Casey, and Brittanie Schneider have recently raised funds for Moore Elementary STEAM lessons to be connected to our students’ classroom curriculum. Last year, our school launched the“ Imagination Station 4 Innovation,” hosted primarily in the school library. Fourth graders who applied to be“ head engineers” met after school once every week to learn the basics of coding, architecture, building, and teamwork.
Following the success of this project, the“ Imagination Station 4 Innovation” will be reaching out to other grade levels as well. In the 2016-2017 school year, first graders at Moore have been learning about Native American culture, life, and history. Connections from the Asset Science“ Weather Unit” have been stretched into Library classes, where students read stories about different tribes and researched where these tribes lived. By studying and discussing these stories, first grade learned about the Wampanoag, Abeneki, and Iroquois tribes in connection to their stories and the settings of those stories.
Connections have been made in other special classes as well; in music class, first grade listened to music of different Native American tribes and learned how this culture uses drumming as a form of communication. Students practiced responding to Native American“ Welcome Songs” to get in their class circle to sing and dance, and then composed their own drum beats with their
MOORE ELEMENTARY
IS4I Up-Date By Mrs. Brittanie Schneider
project group. These drum compositions were then recorded, and will be heard while the wigwams are on display.
Wigwam research continued in Technology class, where students located where each tribe was located, and what the weather for that region was historically for the Native Americans. Using this data, students were able to determine what kind of shelter each tribe had lived in and how the weather played a large factor in what kind of shelter the Natives built. In the next few weeks, first graders will be incorporating scratch coding and Hummingbird robotics to program lights to light up their wigwams, and to play their Native American drum beats recorded in music class.
All of this Native American learning was put to the test in Art class, where students used cardboard, paper straws of various sizes, brown construction paper, tape, and a compass to build their own shelters. Groups began by sketching out ideas for the wigwams. Students discussed how to make the wigwams strong enough to survive different types of weather they had researched in Science and in Technology class, depending on the region the tribe had lived in. The groups then measured a circle with a compass, and then collaborated to create a frame with the straws. Once the frame was built, the students ripped construction paper to cover the frame, imitating the layered outer shell of historical wigwams. To complete the art part of the project, students used a reflection paper to look closely at their team work, evaluate the strength of the wigwams against weather elements, and how they could have improved their build. rentwood Borough
SCHOOL DISTRICT NEWS
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