FabFriday: From Snow Forts to Bees, First Graders Design with Fab@School Maker Studio

Welcome to FabFriday, a blog series that highlights Fab@School Maker Studio in the classroom. For this week's FabFriday we meet Karen Wolff's first grade class at the Boyden School in Walpole, Ma. This post first appeared on Mrs. Wolff's blog, The Wolff Den. 

What a fun week we had building a snow fort! The idea started by exploring with Fab@School Maker Studio software on our Chromebooks.  We experimented with different shapes and connected them. From there, we learned how to make 3-D solids. We were going to create a snow village with our solids, but instead decided to build a snow fort!  We started by creating cubes with the Fab@School Maker Studio, but found that they were too small to build with. We even tried gluing magnets in the cubes to make they stick together, but in the end decided on choosing another solid – rectangular prisms. We went back to the Chromebooks and figured out how to create them and then built our snow fort!

We also created snowflakes to use with the Bee-Bots.

Speaking of bees, we read a story about Honey Bees this week. We learned about the long “u” sound and the two sounds “y” can make at the end of a word. For example, in the word “sunny,” the “y” sound like an “e," but in the word, “fly,” the “y” sounds like an “i.” We also talked about the life cycle of honey bees. We diagramed the bee life cycle using Kid Pix and learned about the anatomy of a bee by creating them with the Fab@School Maker Studio.

In math, we are working with fact families. We learned that all fact families have  three numbers. We can make two addition sentences and two subtraction sentences with the same three numbers.

In social studies we’ve been learning about oceans and continents. We know there are different kinds of land, like plains and mountains and different types of water, like rivers and lakes. We also talked about natural resources like water and wood.