Second- and third-grade students at Washington STEM Academy Thursday afternoon demonstrated what they learned about insects and severe weather to the community. The annual Teachers Credit Union-sponsored Lego® Robotics night was held in the school gym from 6 to 7 p.m. According to second-grade teacher Derek Pike, the second-graders have been studying insect life cycles while the third-graders studied severe weather through project-based learning. “Through all their learning, their final culminating project was to share what they learned with the community,” Pike said. The insects his class looked at included butterflies, dragonflies and cicadas. As part of their projects, his students had to present what they learned about an insect’s life cycle, predators, habitats and body parts. Students then used Lego WeDo® robotics to build a creation with moving parts. They could program the robots to flap its wings or climb a tree or whatever else an insect may do. The last piece of the presentation was a trifold with all the information about the insect on the board. “It’s kind of like an expo where kids present their learning,” Pike said. Students started studying insects at the start of the school year. In October, they started on their robots. Last week, Pike said, they made their trifolds. The other second-grade teachers are Kara Nieter and Josh Wall. Third-grade teachers are Kandi Kessler, Tad Nieter and Lisa King. Nieter said the third-graders had four questions to answer for their projects on natural disasters. The first three questions were: What happens before, during and after severe weather? Each group then picked their own question to answer for the fourth one. “We broke into five groups for each third-grade class,” Nieter said. “Each group decided what project they wanted to do.” Students did their research on Encyclopedia Britannica on the Internet. They built research packets, made robots displaying what their natural disaster was and the effect it could have, and then made 3D prints to add on to the robots.
