7th Graders Begin ELP Course

The 3rd Quarter marked the first time 7th Graders were able to take an ELP course here at the Independence Junior Senior High. The class meets every day during the 3rd Quarter in place of an exploratory class.  Students will work on projects using the Project Based Learning model, allowing students to choose topics that relate to them well or have a high interest in.  They create a project proposal including skills/topics they want to learn more about.  They propose questions and center their activities around finding answers and solutions.
 

Robots with Sensors

 

Using an ultra-sonic sensor, 5th graders were able to program small LEGO creations to search out and collect items.  Programming this one particular task took many hours, however perseverance paid off!

Math Challenge

The Winter Noetic Math Challenge was a big hit with students here at West Elementary.  Students worked very hard learning and using strategies to solve problems.  Landon and Zach scored in the top 10% of the country and earned some medals for their achievements.  Great job to all students on this difficult challenge!

Paper Rockets

Sixth grade students have been studying and engineering paper rockets lately.  They came up with dozens of ideas of what they thought was going to be the perfect rocket.  Fun was had all through the learning process, although many failures were hit along the way.  Just a couple designs and journaling/data recording can be seen below.

Everyone loves a MATH Challenge!

 ELP students have have been learning many new things as they explore challenge problems each week.  As the students work through the challenges they are often learning math curriculum that is 2 or more years above their current grade.  This allows them a constant new challenge in the world of math, as well as keeping their current math benchmarks sharp.  

Some problems remain too difficult for students, so teamwork, or partner work is utilized to find the correct answers.

Wind Energy Exploration

5th Grade students have been studying the effects of wind and how to use it.  

Students designed a car frame to hold their wind collecting "sails".  Each time they made an improvement they would test to see how far the car would travel.  The goal of 240 inches was not an easy task and took kids several designs before they found the right one.

 

3-D printing...continued from COVID-19 Shutdown

A 4th grader, now 5th grader used Tinkercad, an online 3-D engineering site to build this cargo car.  He included a sliding door for loading and unloading his cargo.  A lot of exact measurements in this project! 

WELCOME BACK STUDENTS

 I hope the 2020-21 School Year is a blast for you!