AIG Update

Here’s some of what’s going on in AIG at IBJ:

ASGMath

5

Having wrapped up simulations, students will be working with decimal and measurement conversion (5) and multi-step word problems (4). Sounds easy? Not really. The work will begin fairly simply and then get very hard very fast. I’m going to run this work like a competition, so hold on tight. This work, btw, comes from my favorite mathematician, Ed Zacarro.  Those who wrap up are working on presentations about famous mathematicians. Hopefully they’ll be wrapped up and ready to share by year’s end!

4

With Noetic Math Competition results released (7 students in our nation’s top 50%!) these folks will be reviewing the math work. I’ll give them a couple of classes to revisit the challenge and revise their answers.

3

These students continue their work with pentominoes. They’ll be working with geometric flipping, sliding, and symmetry prior to more challenging work with area and perimeter. All using pentominoes. What is a pentomino? Ask these math students!

ASGReading

5 / 3

Students continue work with Junior Great Books. Fifth has been reading Coming of the Surfman while third is reading The Fisherman and His Wife.  

4

Students continue to wrap up work with John Bellairs’ classic The House with a Clock in its Walls. Some few are already done with the reading, so they’re starting to construct games that show their understanding of the novel - and are fun to play, with any luck!

ESG

5

Primary documents from women in the American Revolution have been our focus. So student broadsides (or many of them) made the blog awhile back. Others are still completing this work while still others have moved on to making political cartoons. The review of current political cartoons (from the magazine The Week) proved pretty amusing.

We’ll also be previewing storytelling techniques to aid in our final work - a story about IBJ! I’ve heard some interesting ideas already!

4

Continued: The ‘Wonder Wall’ topics are beginning to come to fruition through the completion of inquiry-and- research based Google Slides presentations. These I’m posting on the blog with the title:  “Inquiry” followed by the student-specific question. The first two (Dark Energy and Pluto’s planet status) are already up. Students have a rubric to self-evaluate their work. I may weigh in, as well!

I will say we’re a little behind because of some whole-class seminars. Ask your kids about the painting The Trail of Tears!

3

So one intrepid student dared me to show a video about girls and STEAM careers. Which I happily did, of course. In thinking about technology and these students, I was able to procure some robotics construction kits (Little Bits) from the ACS AIG department. These students have been working through introductory lessons as to how the kits work. We’ll look forward to increasingly challenging construction projects in the coming weeks!