For Staff Appreciation Week (way back in April) at the girls’ school, families were asked to “adopt” a staff member. The girls chose one of the GT teachers and worked together with Jen to make a poster for the classroom door.
Molly participated in the county-wide Rube Goldberg machine competition this school year. Her team was called the Mind Masters, and they had to build a complicated Rube Goldberg machine to raise a banner.
It took many weeks of work designing and building, and quite a few runs to get it to actually work, but they did it.
The before picture.
And the after picture.
The girls school had a STEM day, and asked for a parent to come talk to each grade. I was happy to volunteer, and actually got to be the speaker for both fourth grade and first grade. I talked to them about software engineering, the engineering design process, and showed off some fun stuff with lights.
I had planned to use a projector and do some live coding, but failed to have a way to connect my new USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 laptop to their old VGA-only projector (I had an HDMI adapter, but that didn’t help). So, live coding (and a lesson on binary) happened with markers and paper.
At first grade, I wowed the kids by controlling a light (first graders are a lot easier to wow than fourth graders).
Both grades had lots of questions and were very engaged. First grade might have asked questions all day long if I hadn’t eventually cut them off.
It was a lot of fun, and I’m so glad I got to go in and talk to them.
We again attended Bingo night hosted by the girls’ school, and G’Mom and Grampa joined us as they were in town. They were actually in town the weekend before as well, then left to visit friends for the week before returning to spend the weekend with us again. They couldn’t miss Bingo, after all.
Grampa won one of the rounds, and received some VR goggles as a prize.
Shortly after Grampa won Bingo, Jen got picked for one of the door prizes - a Target gift card.
It was a lot of fun. Afterward, Leah and Molly were excited to try out the VR goggles. It was late, of course, but they played with them a bunch the next morning.
Molly played her viola in the school talent show, and did a great job. She was the only violist, and showed everyone how awesome she is.
The girls had Decades Day at school, where they dressed in attire from their favorite decade (or decades). Looking good, girls.
Leah participated in the First Grade Bumble Bee at school. It was impressive how well these kids that haven't been spelling for long did in such a stressful situation. It was a standard single-elimination style spelling bee, and Leah did great, making it to the 5th round (which was when the words got hard, knocking out all but 3 students).
Here is a compilation of each of her words.
She did so great. I was worried when she stumbled on the first word, but she conquered her nerves.
The week before Christmas, Molly had her winter orchestra and chorus concert. I snapped a couple of pictures of her before we went.
First up at the concert was Chorus.
Molly got a bit of a break while the Beginner Orchestra and Beginner Band played. Then, it was Molly’s turn to play in the Advanced Orchestra. It's amazing how far they've come since last year. Note that the orchestra was much smaller for the last song. It was played only by the 5th graders and a few select younger kids (including Molly). Great job, Molly, for passing the audition for the finale.
Molly participated in the Young Author’s Contest at her school. Here she is writing her short story, Magic Maya, involving a girl rescuing her brother who has gone through a portal and been possessed by an evil magician. Here she is hard at work creating her story.
Molly loved HowGirlsCode last year, and signed up to participate in their WeDo Lego robotics after-school activity this year. On the last day, they showed off their robots to us.
Molly called her robot The Dog Beak. She did a great job designing and building it and programming it to chow down. Over the weeks, it went through several different designs and forms, and I think it ended up awesome.
On the last day, parents and siblings were invited to tour their workshop. Molly demoed The Dog Beak for us.
Here are all the robots built by Molly and her fellow coders.
