This week’s STEAM challenge involved creating snowflakes.  We tried to create the slowest falling snowflakes.  We talked about friction, and air flow.  The children had some great strategies, and I was impressed with how the children talked about the reasons behind their design.  It has been great to see the transformation from trial and error engineering to actually applying what they have learned, and giving some thought behind their designs.  Good work Math Monsters.

The second half of our STEAM involved some design challenges, such as creating a snowflake with a star in the middle, with eight sides, with six sides, etc.  It was fun to watch the children work through these challenges.

We have been studying snowflakes.  As a culminating experience, we conducted an experiment to see if we could each create a crystal snowflake.  We talked about how snowflakes start as a speck of dust, and as they travel through the clouds ice crystals begin to form.  Likewise, we hoped the same would happen with our crystals.  We started with a pipe cleaner, submerged in water with Borax dissolved in it.  It was our hope that as the pipe cleaner sits in the water, crystals would begin to form.  We let them sit over night in the water/borax solution, and had a pretty great result when we pulled them out.

Wow, that is quite the wind out there!  I hope that you all had a wonderful snow day, today.  The children have voted to have a PJ/movie day tomorrow, as a class reward.  I hesitated to do so, because of the cold.  However, our classroom is usually toasty warm, and I am pretty positive that we will not be going outside tomorrow.  If conditions deteriorate and school is cancelled tomorrow, we will reschedule to a day next week, once I have had a chance to check the weather, closer to the beginning of the week.  If children want to wear their pajamas to school, they can, or if they want to pack them and change into them at school, that is fine, as well.  Hopefully it will be a great end to this crazy weather week.  Hopefully you all stay warm, and the power stays on. 🙂