The Fourth grade Countries Festival was a great success! I love this yearly Countries project because it is a total immersion of social studies, cultural respect, and creativity. This past month was also about about integration of many disciplines and collaboration between educators and students. We all love to learn about different cultures and the teachers and students learned and created together! I enjoy spending the month with the children helping them create as many projects as they could squeeze in.  The kids love learning about new places so this project is a favorite!

4th graders just had their Countries Festival last Friday showing off their knowledge about their countries with rooms packed with cultural artifacts about each classroom's country of focus. Families and the entire school came to each classroom to learn about Mexico, the Caribbean Islands, Central America, and Canada.

The awesome thing about CLIC is classes can come up every day of the week so the large amount of work that we create is a reflection of this time frame.  Classes spent the last month coming to CLIC, and the teachers had so many great ideas and visions.  The children dove in and worked like crazy to accomplish their vision of how the classroom would transform into their country.  I love walking into the classrooms on the final day to see it all come together.  The rooms are buzzing excitement with the children sharing their knowledge with visitors!

In STEAM Club this month, we are engineering vehicles that are being built with the sole intention to keep the passenger safe in a crash.  Students could only use limited materials like wooden sticks, plastic wheels, straws, tape, glue, a plastic cup, wooden cubes, and rubber bands. The passenger in this case is an egg.  First, we do all of the designing and testing with a plastic egg. but this week we will be using a hard boiled egg in the final test.

The children have loved this project because who doesn't love to crash things!  We set up a ramp that was 1 1/2 feet from the wall, and sent our eggs down to CRASH!  Off came tires and some eggs went flying, but what fun is it to have things work on the first try.  The redesign is the most fun tweaking the car so that the next run is a little bit better.  By the end of the session, most members had a really successful design.

This week should be great fun using the real egg since the shell will be much more delicate than the plastic egg.  Who knew how entertaining an exciting car engineering could be! I love how all of the STEAM students embrace each and every challenge with such enthusiasm.

Over the last two weeks, Mrs. Obuchowski's 6th grade social studies classes have been coming to CLIC to do cultural exploration projects on Africa.  I chose these two projects, because they illustrate the power of  symbolism that each pattern and material reflects.  African tribes have their own identity reflected in their masks, clothing, and ceremonial items.  Students learned how each symbol they chose reflected power, status, and cultural meaning within each tribe.  Students had to then create culturally authentic masks and fabrics using authentic techniques and materials.