Quipus

     Last week in social studies we studied ancient civilizations located in Middle and South America.  One of the civilizations we studied was the Incan Empire.  The Incas were a group of people who established a great civilization high in the Andes Mountains on the west coast of South America in the 1400s and 1500s.  The Incas were known for their unique farming technique of terrace building.  The Incan road system ran for nearly 2,500 miles from Ecuador down to Argentina.  The Inca had a system for getting messages spread all over their vast empire.  They used relay runners that would carry necklace like objects known as quipus. Quipus are a group of knotted strings that the Incas used to keep track of information in the empire.  Each quipu had a main chord with several colored strings attached.  The colors represented different items, and each had knots of varying sizes that stood for numbers.  The Inca kept track of things such as births, deaths, and harvests. 
     Each of my students last week used yarn, and their imagination to create their own personal quipus.  They thought of numbers that were important to them in their lives, and tied knots of varying positions on the colored chords to represent those numbers.  Check out our quipus in the photo below.

This is an actual Incan quipu.

Mystery Google Hangout

     On December 16, 2015, we participated in our first Mystery Google Hangout.  In case you don't know what this is, here is a brief summary of the concept.  Basically two schools from different parts of the United States (or world) call each other via Google Hangouts.  No information is known about each school.  The two classes take turns back and forth asking each other yes and no questions.  An example of a good starting question is, "Are you east of the Mississippi River?"  Then the two classes compete to see which class can identify each other's location first.  
   So we started our Mystery Hangout with a good old-fashioned game of rock, paper, scissors to see which class would ask the first question.  We won, and decided to ask them first if they were located in the United States.  After a brief period of thinking, the other class answered to the affirmative, and we were off and running.  It was a spirited battle back and forth between both classes to see which class would guess the other school's location first.  We decided the best question they asked us was after they learned we were east of the Mississippi River.  They asked, "Do you touch a great lake?"  Of course the answer to that question was yes, and we knew we were going to get guessed.  We had their class narrowed down to being in the Midwest, being east of the Mississippi, and also that it touched the Mississippi River.  Once we finally established that they didn't border Canada, we narrowed it down to Nebraska or Missouri.  Unfortunately, they had already figured out we were from Indiana with their last question.  We were correct in out thinking, and were going to guess Missouri on our next turn.  
     We found out that they were a 4th grade class from Missouri. We then shared some facts about our state, town, and school with them, and they did the same.  The students had a blast participating in the Mystery Hangout.  It is something we plan to do again in the future.  Check out our photos and video clips below.

Will Bus Learning

This week we got to spend three days on the WILL Bus (Warsaw Inquiry Learning Lab) with Mrs. Baird.  After some introductory lessons on technology and engineering, the students were challenged to build a knee brace to support an injured knee.  They were told to think like an engineer.  The students discussed, planned, and created their knee braces in groups of four.  The students had a wonderful three days and learned a lot about how engineering and technology are inter related.  Check out the pictures below to see the students in action.