Thank you for joining us this summer on our amazing online adventure! We had such a blast getting to know your children—seeing their smiling faces, hearing their stories, and watching them work so hard on all their projects and activities. We hope you enjoy the rest of the summer and look forward to seeing you next year… in person!
Minecraft: A Virtual Learning Adventure
For this last week in our virtual Minecraft worlds, we continued to build the cities we started last week. With our skyscrapers complete we moved on to other city essentials. Of course every city needs a hospital, including ours! Our cities have multi-story hospitals complete with an emergency room and an ambulance! Some of our hospitals even had a helipad and helicopter. To keep our streets safe from zombies and creepers, our next challenge was to build a police station. We couldn’t forget the jail cells so we could lock up Mr. Hironaka for trying to eat the sea turtles! Our next build was a pet store with large picture windows so we could look at the cute animals. I wonder what kinds of animals the pet store has for sale today? And don’t forget to pick up some pet food! Finally, even virtual cities can catch fire, so we needed a fire station with a firetruck! The firefighters need a place to sleep and eat, so we had to build them beds, a kitchen, and a dining area. And you can’t have a fire station without the pole!! Of course, this is a city, not separate buildings, so everything had to be connected by streets and sidewalks.
Introduction to Robotics with Lego WeDo
For this final week, we continued our robotics adventure, becoming more independent and self-led. The projects for the week were open-ended and allowed for us to express our creativity more than in previous weeks. We were able to work at their own pace to complete all the sections of our projects. At Open House on Friday, we even taught our families how to complete our favorite robot from the program. To wrap everything up, we wrote about all our achievements this summer.
Little Journalists
For our final week of Summer Programs, we interviewed and wrote about the awesome projects that the Session A Minecraft and the Stop Motion Animation classes had created. This week’s newsletter also featured the different Spirit Week activities, from dress-up days to group movie viewing. We also wrote personal interest stories that ranged from book and movie reviews, to the firsts accomplished by the Vice President, to the cuteness of pigs! Everyone got to try their hand at editing and approving the final copy, and we even had a musical performance during Open House by one of our students! It was an unusual year, having to do everything online, but it still gave us a chance to work on our interviewing, writing, and editing skills, and being online allowed us to make new friends with students from other islands. We hope you enjoy our final newsletter!
Robotics with Lego EV3
Last week, we were given several different projects to work on. We could choose which projects to work on and complete them at our own pace. This week we continued to finish our final projects. Some of us were challenged to build a robot that could play mini-golf. Others are building a “gear model” to observe how two gears work together. A few are building a “geared vehicle” that shows us what happens when we shift gears. Lastly, someo us are experimenting with a “Free Fall” build to predict and observe the time of different objects falling.
“Thank you for your support at home and in school! Itʻs been enjoyable working with your children! ” ~Aloha, Mrs. Nagatoshi
STEM Workshop: Science Olympics
In our last week we tackled a new challenge, Rube Goldberg Machines, while learning a bit about simple machines. First we talked about chain reactions, where one action triggers the next action, which sets off the next, and so on…. We then looked back at some of the simple machines we had already used in previous weeks, like our vehicle ramp (inclined plane), wheeled vehicle (wheel and axle), and our catapults (levers) and thought about how we could incorporate these into our Rube Goldberg actions. As we were brainstorming and testing out our ideas, we learned that a string and paperclip can be turned into a basic pulley! Wedges and screws were the last two simple machines we tried to add to complete our machines, though those are a bit more challenging. We are excited for Open House so that we can share our inventions with our families and friends! Hopefully we will catch some on video to share with all of you too. 🙂
Story Art, Smart Art, Let’s Get ARTed
This week in Let’s Get ARTed, we were finally able to craft all our amazing stories into bound books. We learned creative ways to publish our summer stories, participated in Spirit Week, and shared our creative writings with our family and friends at our Open House.
Adventure Seekers Online
This week, Adventure Seekers got animated in the wonderful word of 2-D! We learned about the first cartoon ever made and the science behind the thaumatrope. Next we learned a little about the history of animation and then made our own animation disks and flip books. Finally, we drew our own super comic books.