Our Designing Alternate Migration Project is officially a month in! After mixing up the classes into groups of 4 or 5, each team has spent these past weeks researching and drafting an alternate migration solution to Salmon ladders to help salmon overcome dams! It has been so much fun to watch their progress and collaboration in action! Group work is seldom without challenges, and we are using role-playing to help navigate ideas such as responsibility, accountability and compromise. This past Friday before Spring Break, most groups had completed their final draft! Upward and onward as when we come back we will begin the construction process.
Presenting our First Drafts and Offering Feedback
Perhaps one of the most rewarding part of PBL is the focus on the process. As a part of the process, each group presented their blueprint draft to receive feedback from their peers, volunteers and the other third grade teachers. It was so wonderful to catch a glimpse of all the other groups' creativity and ideas coming together as well as a great opportunity to practice our respectful feedback skills. From our feedback session, the groups modified and revised their initial design to come up with a final blueprint solution to Salmon ladders. Thank you to all volunteers to took part with the process!
Guest Expert Mr. Cook!
We invited a salmon expert to help build our background knowledge on salmon ladders and transport. Mr. Cook piqued our curiosity with many different methods of water/salmon transportation and had even prepared an outside demonstration of how air bubbles and air pressure can us move water! After his presentation we returned to our blueprint work with some applicable strategies on how salmon movement might occur in our own designs!
Poetry Video!
A big thanks to Will Miceli for putting this wonderful video together of each of our poets reading their selected poetry aloud one more time. Relive the amazing poems from our Poetry Slam and check this video out!