STEM Engineering Quest: Build a Native American Home

Task at hand: 

Build One of 7 Types 

of Native American Homes

Challenge Rules: 

• Use only the materials provided. You may go outside to get more natural materials if needed.
• Be as accurate as possible using books and the internet for information.
• Work as a collaborative group. 
• Feel free to be creative. 

Build a Bark House with a Thatched Roof

We learned many things from this engineering quest:

• Homebuilding isn't easy.
• Working together is not always easy but we get good ideas from each other.
• People built different kinds of homes depending on the regional natural resources.
• Most homes had a hole in the roof to let out the smoke.
• Some people had different homes for winter and for summer.
• Some homes held lots of families.
• Some homes were permanent, some were transportable. 
• The insides of homes were interesting, too.

Who Are We? Our Class Totem Pole and Our Individual Totem Poles

A Totem Pole tells a story. As we begin our study of Native Americans, we worked together to tell the story of the 2014-2015 Navigators Class and to each tell the story of the people who are most important to us. 

Our class Totem Pole, from bottom to top:

• Seabury School: a school where we can learn "with the brakes off"
• The Navigators: 9 eager and engaged students
• A Castle: we loved studying the Middle Ages and making a classroom castle
• Weather: we studied seasons, climate and weather
• Frightful: we learned about the quest of Sam Gribley in My Side of the Mountain. Frightful was his faithful falcon. 
• A Flying Machine: we learned about the quest of Leonardo da Vinci 
• The Navigators' Lighthouse: the symbol of the Navigators, going on a quest to discover our individual pathways

Our Individual Totem Poles:

Look What's in Our Backyard! An Arboretum!

Spring has sprung in Western Washington and off we go to learn more about the flora and fauna of our beautiful state--a perfect way to kick off our study of botany. As the teacher of the Navigators, it was an education for me in that the kids already knew most of the basic scientific terms and systems. I can  tell we are going to have some great learning taking place as we continue to explore 

the wonderful, abundant plant world around us!

Ms Lisa welcomes us to the arboretum at the 

University of Washington Botanic Gardens 

by teaching us some Latin. 

Be a beginning botanist: Look, Listen,

Hear, Smell, Record and Enjoy! 

We go on a scavenger hunt and look for

producers, consumers and decomposers.

We then look for the main trees of Western Washington 

and play a game similar to Rock Paper Scissors:

the Douglas Fir, tall and straight

The Western Red Cedar with J-shaped branches

The Western Hemlock with a bent over top

We then play a game of photosynthesis. Organized chaos at its best!

We learn about how Native Americans used cedar trees
for making many things including mats, baskets,...

 

...and fishing hooks!

Taking advantage of Washington's early spring, we go on a flower hunt. 

We make sure we take a close up look and see all the parts of the flower... 

...and then, using a paintbrush, we help the bees pollinate the flowers.

We end with a resounding YES to all the things 

we learned and experienced at the arboretum. 

Here are 9 various "trees" after our field trip was over. 

Now that we're botanists, we'll always be on the lookout (and smellout and hearout) for interesting things to be found in our great outdoors!

Old Inventions Made Into New Inventions

Here is the promised blog post of how we used our wonderful Tinkertopia stuff (not junk). We used it, along with old computers, blenders, alarm clocks, stereos, radios, etc. and created new inventions! We made a super-stealth drone, a comfortable-bed-in-the-sun with built in drink holders and book shelves, an electricity generator (complete with a wireless electricity carrier to fulfill the needs of all the other classmates' inventions,) a store full of new tools to buy and trade  

and many more creative, innovative ideas. 

We also made a class robot named Rosey who has been programmed to clean our desks, sharpen our pencils, straighten our library and do Mrs. Towne's laundry. Unfortunately, Mrs. Towne won't tell us the password 

to program Rosey to do our homework. 

We had so much fun learning how things work, learning how to use screw drivers and hammers, creating new ideas, working together, sharing and trading, pretending and just plain old playing. One boy even hooked up a battery to a computer fan and had it working! Who needs an expensive box of Legos--just get some old appliances, a screw driver and a bag of stuff (not junk) 

from Tinkertopia!