Right before the break, our Learning Buddies, students from Kindergarten to 8th grade, celebrated Random Acts of Kindness Week by writing and hand delivering messages of hope, kindness, and love to our senior neighbors at Half Moon Village. The residents were greatly surprised and went to their weekly coffee hour with the cards they had received on their doors!
Special thanks to fifth-grade parent Christy Conklin (part of the local Love Ninjas group) for inspiring our students at the morning assembly with the story behind the Hearts Around Half Moon Bay campaign. The students even had the opportunity to generate ideas for the next wooden hearts project. We love our Half Moon Bay Community!
The Design and Innovation Program at Sea Crest is building up steam! There are students coming in all day to create a huge range of projects. While they are having a blast creating, it’s important to point out how the program impacts children in the long run.
Many of the jobs that exist today did not exist twenty, ten or even five years ago. If current trends continue, it’s likely that many of our children will go into careers that don’t yet exist and demand a great deal of adaptability.
We can prepare them for this shifting landscape with two essential problem-solving skills: empathy and grit.
These two skills are the backbone of our innovation program and design thinking. Each of the students’ projects begin with a challenge that needs solving. Next, they go through the design process, which consists of four steps: find it (research), sketch it (brainstorming), build it (prototyping), and share it (gathering feedback).
As students go through these steps, they learn to see things from another person’s perspective and to adapt ideas to fix complex problems. Below are some examples of the challenges they are solving:
Kindergarten & 1st Grade How might we use simple machines? [Experiment with simple machine combinations to solve problems]
2nd & 3rd Grade How might we keep better track of our things in class? [Create custom logo stickers for your things]
4th & 5th Grade How can we address small inconveniences around the school? [Add plants to the garden area, reduce noise in the locker area, and more]
Middle School How might we help teachers have more functional classrooms? [Build storage, adjust lighting, add plants, etc.]
How might we give the kindergartners more choice time options? [Build and donate a variety of toys]
Congratulations to the seventh-grade students on such a successful Science Festival and Innovation Exposition! We were all impressed by their hard work and the deep knowledge demonstrated in their projects. A special thank you to Mr. Twining for getting our students prepared for the event and Ms. Giacotto for helping to organize.
Thank you to the eighth-grade students for your dedication by running the amazing science stations, which the entire school enjoyed. This K-8 event was open to the public and a fantastic opportunity to celebrate science and innovation. There were a number of inventive projects, experiments and hands-on activities for all ages!
Thank you also to our parent volunteers and judges. We could not have done it without your help!
Sea Crest expands science fair categories. Published in the Half Moon Bay Review on Wednesday, January 17th. By Sarah Griego Guz.
The science fair is a rite of passage for many middle school students. Many adults remember sweating out the details the night before the big day in a final attempt to consolidate months of work on a tri-fold display board.
Sea Crest School has folded this event into an open house and schoolwide science festival that is suitable for all ages.
The hands-on happening offers innovative science experiences such as a banana keyboard made courtesy of Makey Makey. The electronic invention connects everyday objects to computer programs.
The standard science fair challenge is great for students who are wired to conduct experiments and are interested in specific topics, but others view the science fair with apprehension because they can’t find a question that interests them. Sea Crest Middle School science teacher Matthew Twining decided to modify the assignment.
“Traditional science fair projects appeal to a subset of the students,” said Twining. “There are students who are interested in engineering or environmental topics. I wanted to give everybody a chance to do something more closely aligned with their interests and aptitudes.”
Taking a page from Pasadena schools’ successful Innovation Exposition, Twining added categories for Invention, Environmental Innovation, Reverse Engineering, and Science Fiction.
Seventh-grader Chase Urban has been working on a project in the Reverse Engineering category.
“I couldn’t find a project or a question that I wanted to answer,” said Urban. “I like taking things apart. I liked the idea of taking the digital camera apart and mapping it all out and figuring out how it worked.”
