Thank you for joining us for our first summer online! We missed seeing all of your faces last summer! And while we aren’t in-person this yet this year, we can at least see all of your smiles and enjoy hearing your stories and watching your creativity!
Animation Studio: Stop Motion Animation
We started this week with an introduction to what is stop motion—what it looks like and what parts included in a stop motion video. We worked through some challenges with our devices and the stop motion programs. I am so proud of your children’s perseverance and patience as some of them dealt with these challenges. We completed 3 different projects: Stop Motion message & drawing, Stickman, and Paper Cut Outs. We shared our completed projects and reflected on our work—how they made us feel, what we liked, and what changes we will make on our next project. It was an exciting week!
Hawaii Nature Study Program: Explorers
The HNS Explorers started week 1 with our unit on Insects! We began our mealworm study by observing the different parts of our worms and how they moved. We also learned about the different stages of their life cycle and how to care for them.
We also learned about the distinctions between butterflies and moths. Ask your child to tell you how they are similar and different in the different stages of their life cycle.
Lastly, we learned about Hawai’i’s endemic butterflies; Kamehameha Butterfly and Blackburn’s Butterfly. We also learned about the economic importance of specific butterflies and moths we find here on Hawai’i.
Minecraft: A Virtual Learning Adventure
Thank you for your patience and perseverance as we worked to get every student logged into our Minecraft world. Our first challenge was to express our building talents and creativity by creating our own treehouses. After a day of crazy construction, we presented our amazing creations to our classmates! We went on to design our own green houses and finally, a castle. We got to build the castles in our own worlds so that we could continue to work on our projects over the long weekend!
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Art in Nature
Our exciting art class focuses on creating personal works of art that are inspired by and constructed from nature! Our first project was to design our own Nature Journals. We created and designed our own keepsake notebooks. We opened up our packets of air dry clay for the second project! We crafted leaf bowls. Some of us used actual leaves to make impressions in the clay. Others shaped their clay into leaves. On day three we had to bring leaves to class and created colorful leaf print artwork with our acrylic paints. Our final project this week was to get flowers, leaves, and other plant life to create leaf weaving art pieces by wrapping string around sticks or cardboard and weaving our greenery and flowers through it.
STEM Workshop: Lego Machines
We started this week with a short presentation on simple machines—how they’re used and why they’re beneficial. Then it was time to build some simple machines of our own! We started with a level and observed how much effort we needed when we changed the positions. Next we explored inline planes and the amount of tires it would take to move a weight up the ramp by adjusting the length. We also did experiments with a wheel and axle, a pulley system, and a wedge. Ask us to demonstrate what we learned!