Magnets, Light Rail and Donuts

This week's challenge:  design a road with masking tape,

find a way to attach a magnet to your car,

Use another magnet to either attract or repel your car to make it move on your road.

We're starting a unit on transportation,

today we took a school bus to the light rail,

rode it to the end of the line,

picked up donuts,

found some special people,

and visited the Seabury Middle School.

We had lots of opportunities today on our visit to downtown Tacoma to observe many different forms of transportation.  The light rail may have been our favorite.  We're wondering what else we can get a ride on!

Echolocation and Sound Waves

This week we've been talking about bats.  One of the things that really caught the kids'
attention is echolocation.  We did an experiment with the Sphinx class exploring sound waves.

We used paper cups and string to demonstrate how sound waves worked. 

We roasted pumpkins, 3 different flavors and then did a taste test.
Sweet beat out salty and spicy. 

In math we are working on symmetry.

We've been pretty successful!

The Alchemist class joined us for a little more exploration of symmetry.

Halloween Fun!

Thanks to our parents for planning a fun Halloween celebration.  Fun games, good food and amazing costumes!

Big week for STEM!

We had 2 big STEM projects in our class this week.  Our Alchemist mentors helped us with a pumpkin exploration.  We weighted and measured them, counted the lines, drew them and finally checked to see if they would float.  By accident, we found out they also bounce.

Our Sphinx mentors worked on mazes with us.  The mazes had to be built out of something heavy enough that the Hexbugs couldn't move the walls.  It took a lot of teamwork to come up with a maze the bugs could navigate.