Engineering a Play Dough Process

We made a batch of low quality play dough so we could see the process we followed.  We then used our schema from yesterday's combination test to come up with a process that we hope will produce a higher quality play dough.  We will follow our process on Monday and Tuesday on build 1 and 2 for our play dough.  Please don't have them wear really nice clothes on those days.  

For the month of October, the GCISD Counseling Services team has invited the entire district to celebrate unity and stomp out bullying. At our campuses, students will take part in a variety of activities all month long to learn positive messages and lessons to share with each other. Two days have been set aside for district-wide awareness. 

Monday, October 3 - Stomp Out Bullying Day  (http://www.stompoutbullying.org/) 

Wear a Blue Shirt, boots and jeans!

Wednesday, October 19 - Unity Day (http://www.pacer.org/bullying/nbpm/unity-day.asp)

Wear an Orange shirt and jeans!

Testing Play Dough Materials

We spent today observing and analyzing the materials that are available for our play dough engineering challenge.  We looked at their properties by themselves and some combinations of materials.

Low Quality

Today we got to preview our base process for the play dough we are going to engineer for the ECDC. We quickly decided that it was a low quality play dough and we would have a lot of improving to make a high quality play dough from this process.

play dough

Testing high quality play dough to see what properties we want our engineered play dough to have.

Our art teacher is asking for volunteers to help hang and take down art in the hallways.  If you are interested please e-mail.  Deborah.mattox@gcisd.net

Help our school win 50,000

Thanks to General Mills and Walmart, every Walmart-exclusive Box Tops Certificate that we clip and collect until 11/2/2016 earns our school a chance to be one of 20 winners of 50,000 Bonus Box Tops.  That's $5,000 for our classrooms! With your help, we can make a difference for our school! Spread the word and do what you can to help clip and collect more Box Tops than ever.

Cannon PTA

Playdough Kickoff

Today we had a visit from Molly Crego from the ECDC. She was letting us know that they are in need of some high quality play dough.  We will have to use or knowledge of matter to help us with this engineering challenge. 

A deadline of Friday, September 30th has been set to have all the iPad User Agreement and device fees.  If you have already turned your form and fee, we thank you.  If not please get these turned in quickly. 

Mats

Today we built our final mats.  Our smart engineers were able to solve the animal shelter problem in less than 5 layers.  This will save money for the animal shelter.  We created movies to let them know how to make the mats.  We hope this helps them. 

Mat Engineering

Today in our animal shelter engineering mat project we tested the materials to see which ones leaked. We do not want our mat models to leak at the animal shelter.

Properties of Matter

Today we started to analyze and test the materials we have available for our animal shelter mat engineering challenge.  We looked at the properties of each material and tested each for soaking up water.

Oobleck

Experimenting with Oobleck to try and figure out if it is a solid or liquid.

Dot Day Fun

Today was International Dot Day.  We celebrated by creating dots and then using the Quiver App to make our dots 3-D using augmented reality.  They were amazing.

Muddy Mats Kick Off

Today we had a visit from The Grapevine Animal Shelter. They shared with us they are having a problem with the animals tracking mud into the shelter and the employees and volunteers slipping.  We decided we could use our schema about properties of matter to engineer a solution for them.  We started the engineering design process by imaging possible solutions. 

Mass

Today we compared the mass of solids.

U.S. symbols

We researched United States symbols all week and today we had to take all of our new information and apply it to our engineering challenge.  They had to create a model of a symbol out of Legos.

Library Books

Today we started to learn about place value.  We went down to the library to try and figure out how many books are on our shelves.  After some hardship the scholars decided that tomorrow we would group the books by tens to make the job easier.  

Citizenship awards

The kids were given good citizenship traits from our posters earlier in the week. They then had to engineer an award that symbolized that trait.  For the share section of our engineering process they got to present their award to who they felt was the most deserving in the class.  Congratulations to these great citizens.  

Collage Colors Day

Good citizens

This week we have been looking at what makes someone a good citizen. The students brainstormed how they are good citizens here at school and in their communities.  Then they made posters to showcase their citizenship.