Monday, August 31, 2015 Welcome to The Exploration Lab! This will be an amazing year! One already exciting development is that our class has been designated an Imagination Chapter, of the Imagination Foundation who sponsors Caine’s Arcade and the Global Cardboard Challenge. As one of only 130 Imagination Chapters in the world (!), we’ll have the opportunity to delve deeper into the world of creative play. Stay tuned for the exciting work to come! “Never quit!” – Gigi We started our day together with a read aloud, The Most Magnificent Thing. In the story, a young girl goes through the process of designing and creating a unique invention. However, she hits some snags along her journey. Despite her challenges, she learned to never give up! Inspired by the character’s journey, we used her lesson to tackle our first activity of the year—a ‘Brown Bag Surprise’ engineering challenge. Students were provided with a bag of materials and had the task of creating a structure that would allow a marble to travel at least 40

centimeters. Through great collaboration and idea sharing, all of the teams completed the challenge! Check out the pictures and some of the thoughts from our budding engineers.

Parlez vous français? We also dipped out toes into French. We learned basic instructions that we use at our school. And acted them out to connect the term to movement. One of our favorites—Dansez! —which means, Dance! We will continue to practice our phrases to help us build upon our knowledge base throughout the year. Creativity Exercise Take a common object, paper clip, pencil, etc. and try to think of as many different uses for it as possible. A simple task like this encourages students to develop their creativity skills, in the areas of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. How many ideas can you come up with?

Classroom Support Creating and building is a big part of life in The Exploration Lab. If you have extra materials lying around—cardboard, fabric, recyclables—whatever you are willing to spare, we would love to use them for our building materials. Your child can bring them in on Mondays, when our class meets. Thank you! Creativity takes courage! Ms. Charlot

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How are we going to stand it up?! That’s our big problem! -Danny

We taped it because it kept on leaning that way. The slide should be straight. -Gigi

If it’s [the structure] flat, there is not enough air to push it [the marble] down. - Keegan

It would overbalance. The stick is not flat or fat on the bottom. - Genevieve