Cultivating Questioners

I’ve been looking forward to this week for over a month! It’s our final week of school before vacation and it’s all about the Grinch in STEM class. I’ve put together a variety of Grinch-related tasks for my students in grades K-4. When they arrive in class this week, students are able to move freely between tasks for the duration of class.

• Super Sleds: This challenge involves creating a sled that the Grinch can use to slide down Mt. Crumpit. This station is stocked with cardboard, rubber bands, tin foil, index cards, and paper clips.

• Balance It On Crumpit: At this station, the Grinch has a bag full of stolen goodies. Students have to make the balance level by adding a variety of weighted objects to the plastic bucket.

• Zipping Into Whoville: Using cups, pipe cleaners, string, binder clips, and rubber bands, students try to create the most effective zipline possible to help the Grinch get back into Whoville to return all of the stolen gifts.

• A Seuss-ian Creation: This station is open-ended and challenges students to use a variety of recycled materials to create a new toy or musical instrument that a Who can use to make “noise, noise, noise!”

• Lifting a Tree: At this station, students help the Grinch stuff a tree up the chimney by exploring how a simple pulley system works.

• A Whoville Christmas Tree: Using cups, students try to build the tallest tree possible. Once it’s built, they can decorate it using the pompoms.

• Grinch’s Growing Heart: On Christmas Eve, the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. At this station, students use Legos to create three different sized hearts.

• iPad Grinch Drawing: This activity is geared towards my youngest kiddos — using a Finger Paint app on our iPads, they try to create a picture of the Grinch.

• Stealing Presents: Maybe my favorite of the activities! I got this awesome new toy — The Turing Tumble — and have turned it into a Grinch Game activity. Marbles get loaded into slots at the top left and right of the plastic board and students use different components that can get placed onto the board to try to get all of the marbles to wind up on the Grinch’s portion of the bottom of the board. (I’ll try to get a picture that better illustrates how the Turing Tumble works.)

  

I’m looking forward to four more days of the joyful noise, noise, noise that these games have created in my classroom!