It’s week 2, and the students are starting to get past their first week shyness. We are happy to hear a lot more chatter in our virtual classrooms. But it wasn’t just all laughing and socializing! The students were all hard at work on their projects!
Animation Studio: Stop Motion Animation
This week we focused on our stickman stop motion project. We were asked to create a storyline with characters, setting, and music. As we completed our projects, we shared our work with the class. It was fun seeing what everyone created! Mrs. Nagatoshi commented, “It is wonderful seeing the studentʻs thoughts and creativity come through their projects. I am amazed at their works of art!”
Hawaii Nature Study Program: Explorers
During week two, we learned about many native Hawaiian birds and their importance to our islands. We also learned why many of those birds are either extinct or endangered and how we can help to protect more birds from becoming extinct. We look what we learned and got creative by making sculptures of native Hawaiian birds with materials we had at home.
We also welcomed our first guest speaker, Uncle Aukai, who taught us a Hawaiian song about the Hawaiian names for different types of animals and more. Ask us if we remember some of the different animal names in Hawaiian!
Minecraft: A Virtual Learning Adventure
With the tech issues mostly behind us, we jumped into a busy week of building! We finished the medieval castles we started last week and presented them to the class. The “big” project this week was our Egyptian pyramids. We each made our own massive pyramid. All our pyramids needed to have a zoo, an aquarium, and a McDonald’s or a cafe on the inside. Most of us build our McDonald’s on the outside, next to our pyramid. One pyramid even had a dojo instead of a McDonald’s. Some of us got very creative with our zoos and aquariums. There was a basement zoo and a glass ceiling aquarium. Ask us to give you a tour of our castle and pyramid worlds! We ended the week by starting on our next project, recreating Minecraft versions of famous landmarks.
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Art in Nature
This week we experimented with several different watercolor techniques. We learned how the wax in crayons repels watercolor, how salt reacts to watercolor, and that glue mixed with salt absorbs watercolor. Using our new watercolor knowledge, we created large watercolor mosaic pieces to display. We also didn’t forget about Father’s Day this Sunday! We can’t wait to surprise dads and grandpas with our creative nature-themed gifts!
STEM Workshop: Lego Machines
This week we are building vehicles that use renewable energy. We explored solar panels, wind turbines, and hand cranks, and learned to collect data from these different energy sources. We used this data to create graphs so we could read the trends and to make predictions on certain scenarios.