Back to School with STEAM!

Last night was the Woodlawn Back to School evening and we had a great time at the STEAM table.  The students were able to practice their engineering skills with solar panel challenges, count rings on wood cookies and sunflowers, and predicting if packages would be lighter or heavier on Mars compared to Earth.  We were also able to run a fun relay race station so the students use up some of their energy and learn about ways we can recycle at our school!

Thanks you to my helpers at the STEAM table last night - it was wonderful to see the students teaching each other and coming up with new ways to solve a problem! 

Math and art

What better way to experiment and play with difficult math concepts than with knitting.  This tactile project demonstrates Borromean Rings:

"Borromean rings consist of three topological circles which are linked and form a Brunnian link (i.e., removing any ring results in two unlinked rings). In other words, no two of the three rings are linked with each other as a Hopf link, but nonetheless all three are linked." [1]

The Borromean ring pattern was created by mathematician Sarah-Marie Belcastro and Madison Stuart

The second example is based on the Scientific American article "Knotting Needles Makes Knitted Knots".  The pattern, designed by Sarah-Marie Belcastro, creates a Torus or Trefoil Knot, similar to a möbuis but with more twists. I cast on 100 stitches on circular needles, tied a loose square knot, and then started knitting in the round. 

Recycling Art

We need your small plastic bottle caps! As part of our STEAM programing at Woodlawn this year, our students will be focusing on becoming Wildcat Warriors for our planet - reducing, reusing, and recycling. We've been recycling the landslide of water bottles, but what about the caps? Let's make art!

To make a super cool installation, though, we need lots more plastic caps. Caps off your milk jugs and peanut butter jars. Caps from juice bottles and soy sauce. . . all of them! We have one collection site located near the front office at Woodlawn in NE Portland and Rieke Elementary will be collecting for us in SW Portland

Below is just one of a hundred examples of bottle cap murals that can be found online, just to so you can get a general idea of awesomeness to come! (The sample artwork is from this site: http://www.methowarts.org/methow-valley-sunset-bottle-cap-…/)