Saturday, December 20, 2008

December '08 MacRichment Newsletter


December 20, 2008!

I'm sitting here in my jammies 'cause I am having trouble getting motivated to get dressed and go SHOPPING on the last Saturday before Xmas!

It's so hard to believe that the month of December at school is already over! And I have not blogged about it!

Projects are filling the tables and some have been presented! Because of time, space, and sheer numbers I've asked that the students give a brief summary of what they chose to pursue, touch on what they accomplished, and, basically, leave an invitation to anyone who would like to know more. The students are proud of their work and so tend to elaborate a bit longer than necessary!!

So far, however, we have had an interesting mix! Baseball (including where are the best seats in the Atlanta Stadium), Winter Holidays (with a dreidel game and a statue representation of all the tenants of Kwanzaa), Stonehenge (again, with a domino-Lego representation!!), the Mystery of Big Foot (with a diorama!), the Loch Ness Monster (!), a Power Point Travel Agency tour of Washington, DC, and a look at the possibilities of Alien Life forms! These were my risk takers who paved the way for the next bunch (I'm sure there were more who would have been happy to take the plunge, but time didn't permit!)

I hope to get the rest of the projects shared by the end of the first week in January so that we can move on to Robotics! I'm almost as excited about that as the students are! I plan to set it up in a menu-format, almost like centers, where groups work on an X-Menu assignment and then move to another Y-Menu, then to the Z, etc. A few of my students have had the opportunity to learn some programming in the 5th grade CIA Enrichment Block so they will be able to continue on that path. Parents are welcome to visit, to see what's going on, first hand. No, the students may not bring the robots home to share with you!! We'll take bunches of photos so check back here often to see the latest!

Okay, okay, I've put it off long enough. Time to get dressed and go out into the fray!
More soon!
Remind me to tell you about *the AltaMath Bunch,
my 1st grade *RoboBoys,
*The "Let's Get Geeky with It" Group,
*The Building Big Mini-Courses,
*the Actresses and
*the Children's Hospital Service Project!
among other things!!

XXOO!!
Mrs. Mac

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