Mae Talks Harvester Ants

Mae has concluded her study of Harvester Ants in ELP. As a final product of her learning, she decided to create an informational poster that highlighted some of the most important facts she learned. While she learned a lot, we saw quickly that it would have been difficult to list all of those new facts. We instead synthesized our learning into the main ideas, as we saw them. Mae also carefully made a scientific drawing of a Harvester Ant, labeling the main body parts.

To share her work, Mae made the following video to share. The picture below the video is of the scientific drawing she made of the Harvester Ant, which is a little difficult to see in the video. Enjoy!

Mae's (impressive) scientific drawing of a Harvester Ant.

Futures Wheels

Our young futurists have been hard at work on their Futures Wheels. A Futures Wheel is a tool used by futurists to explore impacts of possible events. In this case, students are using the future invention they chose earlier as the "event".  They are tasked with first identifying the primary impacts of their invention, should it become a reality. They then let their creative thinking take over and explore tertiary impacts. The initial stage of this was more of a web than a wheel, with the goal of getting the students thinking about all possible scenarios, no matter how ridiculous (and they often were ridiculous!).

I'll post some examples on here soon so you can see how they look. The kids have now moved on to focusing their thinking into 4-6 primary impacts, and a single chain of possible events that could stem from each. Later, they will present their findings to their ELP group accompanied by their recommendations about whether or not the invention should become a reality.