Class Video Chats with NASA Astronaut Nicholas Patrick!

Astronaut Nicholas Patrick taught us lots about ham radios, and he also answered our questions about living on the International Space Station:

Natalie: We asked lots of different questions, and Dr. Patrick explained his answers well. We all learned something!

Pablo: I learned how astronauts sleep in space.

Lauren: It was cool to learn about how astronauts eat and go to the bathroom on the ISS!

Catalina: We learned that it's OK to play with your food in space!

Eduardo: I learned that astronauts take a "shower" with cloths.

Bernarda: It was exciting, and I got to ask TWO questions.

Julie: I learned that when astronauts sit on the toilet, it works like a gentle vacuum.

Thank you Dr. Patrick and Laurent Thomin, at the AWTY International School, for arranging this fabulous exchange!

Using the Smart Board to Show That We Are Thinkers (Written by Everyone)

It was really fun, but hard, making this video for our PYP assembly because we had to do it over a few times in the beginning. Some mistakes that we made on our first try were: looking at the teacher, being a little too silly, accidentally knocking down things during the taping, taking too long, and not having enough light. There are other things in school that we have to do more than once to make them better, like reading slower a second time, proofreading our written work, and re-designing projects that we engineer. It was very fun to make this video and now the other kids in our school know more about using Smart Boards!

Pablo's Air Rocket Launches (Digital Storytelling)!

Skype Chat with Ecuadorian NASA Engineer, Ms. Juniper (By B.A. and A.J.)

(B.A) It was interesting Skype chatting with Ms. Juniper because we were talking to a NASA engineer, and an engineer is someone who builds things. Ms. Juniper builds parts for the International Space Station (ISS)! I got to ask her why she chose her job, and she told me that since she was a baby she liked to build things, and she likes to scuba dive in the big tank at the Johnson Space Center. It's a big pool, and inside is a model of the ISS. When I grow up I want to build things too, but I want to build SUPER  big buildings. I went to New York City once and saw the Empire State Building, and that's the kind of engineering that I want to do!

(A.J.) I thought that meeting Ms. Juniper was super cool, because it was my first time meeting an engineer. I got to ask her if the astronaut space suit, that she uses under the water, was comfortable and she said, not so much...it could be better. Ms. Juniper said that it's more comfortable in space because it's not so heavy when there isn't gravity. On Earth it weighs around 300 pounds! If I were to design a new space suit and oxygen tank, I would make it out of aluminum so that the sun would bounce off of it, and then I would put cloth on top to protect it. This would make the suit much lighter. This chat was even more special because Ms. Juniper is also Ecuadorian!

Hands-On Math (By the Whole Class)

Lauren: We learn a lot about math by doing Work Places, which are math centers. For our math lesson, we even got to use candy to collect data and then graph which color showed up the most.

Catalina: I played the game called "25 Cents or Bust". This game teaches us how to count money, and the winner has to get as close to 25 cents  as he or she can without going over.

Matthew: We use the scale to see how much things weigh. We chose to weigh the giant red ball, and it weighed the same as 86 ceramic tiles!

Pablo: In the video I helped Emilo on the Smart Board so that he could figure out how to do double-digit addition with a Tic-Tac-Toe game.

Natalie: In the Treasure Game, that the girls were playing, we learn how to do double-digit subtraction.