Trash Pick-Up day is an annual ISU event, which takes place during the last week of school. This year, the grade 8 students organized it, but all students from grades 6-11 took part. We chose to clean up Bogd Khan mountain behind Zaisan as this is an area that gets a lot of trash from hikers and the ger camp nestled in the valley. Everyone pitched in and did a great job!
Sure, no problem!
Making felted wool with grade 8 students.
Our last unit of the year in grade 8 was a community and service unit in which the kids learned about child development, studied wool felting techniques, and are making toys for a local orphanage. Last Friday, a teacher from the Tsagaan Alt Wool Shop came to teach the students how to work with raw wool.
It’s actually quite an easy process, and the art of felt making is indigenous to Mongolia. Their ger homes are made of felted wool, as are many other objects used in everyday life, like boots, vests, toys, potholders, etc. They also make and sell jewelry, scarves, and even ties made of felted wool!
As you can see from the pictures, all the kids got their hands in the process, and now they are in the process of cutting the finished wool and sewing toys of their own designs. I’ll include more pictures when the toys are finished.
In our last unit for the year in grade 7 we learned about different kinds of bridges and the students created their own truss bridges out of artstraws and tape. Each pair was given 20 artstraws and 1 meter of tape. If they ran out of tape they could trade 5 straws (no partial trades!) for one straw length of tape.
Every bridge design was unique. Besides material restrictions, the only instructions were to make the bridges with an inside span of 25 cm and a total span of 33 cm, 4 cm on each end to set on the “abutments” (desks). Bridges that did not meet these specifications would be disqualified, so we had a lot of last minute measuring and adjusting!
For weights we borrowed wood and metal cubes from the science department. The lightest one made of pine weighed 8.4 grams, and the heaviest one made of copper weighed 145.6 grams. Once a bridge could hold one set, we started on a second, and in some cases a third!
The winning bridge held 2092.5 grams - that’s 4 lb and 9.81 oz! Congratulations to Nomin and Namuun who built the winning design!
Our Bridge-tastic competition!
These are the grade 9 students programming their robotic vehicles to go through a maze.
These are the grade 6 students making and flying their mini kites.
At the end of each school year we teachers rush to get student work graded, all our report card comments written, and everything plugged into the reports before the last week of school when we’ll have assemblies, sports day, trash clean-up activities and more. But even though all this has to be done, we still have classes, so this is the time to do fun projects with the kids (in my class, at least!).
This year in grade 6 we are making mini-kites using colored paper, tape, string, ribbons, crepe paper, and artstraws. It took one double class period (80 minutes), so when I see the kids on Friday, we’ll be ready to take the kites outside and discover if lift or drag - the aerodynamic forces we’ve been studying - will win out.
In grade 9 we’ve been programming the Lego robotic vehicles they made to run through a maze of their own design. The students are furiously competing to see who can first program them successfully.
A few of the grade 8 and many of the grade 9 students are on a week-long canoe trip down the Tuul River. The rest of grade 8 is finishing up the toys they are making for their service project with the orphanage: painted puzzles and felted wool items.
Grade 7 students are just finishing up building bridges for their “Bridge-tastic” competition to see which creation can hold the most weight before breaking, and grade 10 are off doing a Habitat for Humanity building project.
The grade 8 service project was a success! June 1st was Children’s Day, and we had beautiful weather for a picnic and games.
