Kristen Saunders: Egg-celelent!!

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Egg-celelent!!

I'm sure a number of you heard of how we closed out our week before vacation, but just in case you didn't, I thought I would give you the info on our egg drop experience. This activity started in the beginning of the week with a Learning Lane assembly. During this assembly Mrs. Scorza talked about what a problem and solution are, and then proceeded with the problem being about creating a container to hold an egg so it wouldn't break. We then worked as a whole group to brain storm what materials we may need to create this container. Mrs. Scorza then revealed the things that her and Ms. Johnson had picked up at Ruths, http://www.ruths.org/.

Students were then teamed up in multi-aged groups and sent off to the different classrooms on Learning Lane. It was a furry of excitement as students were transformed into creative engineers! One of the important lessons we were trying to teach students was to work cooperatively with their teammates. They were not allowed to create their own thing, but they were to collaborate with others to come up with the best way to make their egg holder. Unfortunately, we ran out of time that day so, we gave students 20 minutes before the egg drop to rework their creation. They were then given a piece of chalk to try out their holder, this was to see if the chalk would fly out or break, therefore showing them the need to revamp their engineering and work on problem solving skills.

Finally, before recess time, it was time to put our work to the real test!! We all walked out to the lower playground, where on the foot bridge we would drop our egg. Everyone cheered and counted down the teams on as they dropped their eggs and anxiously awaited the results of SPLAT or a whole egg raised to show everyone their success!!

This was a very exciting and fun activity for everyone involved, including us teachers. I was so excited through the whole process to hear the creative and higher level thinking conversations of students, to see them really grow as collaborators, and to once again bond students as a community of learners. Below are a few pictures of our egg-celent experience.