We've been noticing an abundance of acorns in our outdoor space which inspired us to do a STEM challenge in this mast year! House Table teams were tasked to fill as many acorns as they could gather into a yardwaste bucket with the stipulation that the bucket could not be moved. They would need to engineer innovative ways to move large amounts of acorns using only their own hands and the clothes they wore.
Kids quickly figured out that a buddy could stuff your hood with a good amount of acorns for transport up the hill. Hats, pockets and even gloves could be stretched to capacity with more. Some kids made an apron pouch with the bottom of their shirt folded up to accommodate even more acorns. Which House Table would win? At the end of the time limit, it looked like one bucket was the most full, but was it? There were a lot of leaves and sticks taking up space in that bucket as well. Time to tally the score.
Counting them all was a challenge that brought us into the thousands! First graders used their math time to group the acorns into groups of 10s and 100s using tally marks to keep track of how many 1000s, 100s, 10s and 1s they counted. This task took a lot of focused work, but we wanted an accurate count!
Here are the results:
Feather Island collected the most at 1,334.
Popsicornia came in with a total of 1,302.
Wild Island was just shy of that at 1,301.
And Blue Land finished with 766.
All together, we amassed 4,703 acorns!
Each of the house tables did a great job using teamwork in their scavenging and collecting. We returned our hoard to the outdoor classroom for all our local critters to enjoy - blue jays, squirrels, turkeys, chipmunks, mice, voles and deer. Enjoy the pictures below of this exciting challenge!
No comments:
Post a Comment