Tuesday, September 1, 2015 Welcome to The Exploration Lab! This will be an amazing year! One already exciting development is that our class has been designated an Imagination Chapter, of the Imagination Foundation who sponsors Caine’s Arcade and the Global Cardboard Challenge. As one of only 130 Imagination Chapters in the world (!), we’ll have the opportunity to delve deeper into the world of creative play. Stay tuned for the exciting work to come! To design is to “make things out of junk!”– Patty We started our day together with a read aloud, The Most Magnificent Thing. In the story, a young girl goes through the process of designing and creating a unique invention. However, she hits some snags along her journey. Despite her challenges, she learned to never give up! Inspired by the character’s journey, we used her lesson to tackle our first activity of the year—a ‘Brown Bag Surprise’ engineering challenge. Students were provided with a bag of materials

and had the task of creating a device that would launch a pom pom. Through great collaboration and idea sharing, all of the teams completed the challenge! Check out the pictures and some of the thoughts from our budding engineers.

Parlez vous français? We also dipped out toes into French. We learned basic instructions/actions we do in our lives and acted them out to connect the term to movement. One of our favorites—Dormez —means to sleep. We will continue to practice our phrases to help us build upon our knowledge base throughout the year. Creativity Exercise Take a common object, paper clip, pencil, etc. and try to think of as many different uses for it as possible. A simple task like this encourages students to develop their creativity skills, in the areas of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. How many ideas can you come up with? Classroom Support Creating and building is a big part of life in The Exploration Lab. If you have extra materials lying around—cardboard, fabric, recyclables—whatever you are willing to spare, we would love to use them for our building materials. Your child can bring them in on Tuesdays, when our class meets. Thank you! Creativity takes courage! Ms. Charlot

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The more space you have between the lever and the fulcrum, the further it will go. -John

You break it by accident but you just keep on going. - Mikey

I’m using blow power. - Isobel

It looks like a real catapult; just made out of common materials - Isobel