Featured Projects

Just because SOLs are over, doesn’t mean the learning stops. All Arlington schools have multiple exciting projects going on in the last few weeks of school. Each day, through the end of the year, different school activities will be highlighted. To view previous activities and projects by level, click on the links to the left. Elementary School | Middle School | High School

Featured activities for Wednesday, February 10, 2016:

 Barcroft Gravity Roller Coaster

Barcroft fifth grade students have been working on a gravity roller coaster. Initially students created a marble maze out of boxtops in order to understand gravity’s pull, followed by a simple experiment on the speed paper drops due to friction. After a short video from NASA, where an astronaut proves Galileo and Newton’s ideas, students worked as a team to design a roller coaster. The designs are tried and tested using a pingpong ball, marble, insulation foam piping, hollow paper tubes and some masking tape. The project culminates with a scoring rubric for each team attempting 10 complete marble runs, and each bend or loop adds bonus points for difficulty.

Oakridge Galimoto Workshops

Visual artist Karen Brown led Oakridge’s K-2 grade classes in a workshop where each student created their own Galimotos (moving toy vehicles). This workshop was the culminating activity for a quarter-long study of the book Galimoto by Karen Lynne Williams, using the reading comprehension strategy of synthesis. For a month prior to the week-long workshop, the Oakridge community sent in their recycled items and students used this trash to create their own unique Galimotos.

Kenmore Rain Garden

As part of her International Baccalaureate (IB) Creativity Action Service (CAS) Project and Girl Scout Gold Award project, Washington-Lee Senior, Cailin Dyer partnered with Kenmore sixth grade science teacher Liz Castillo to build a rain garden at Kenmore. The idea for the rain garden was based on research sixth grade students did on the water quality of Four Mile Run, the amount of impervious surfaces on the Kenmore property and storm water run-off observations. Though much of the work was done by the sixth graders, several Washington-Lee seniors provided the muscle needed to dig the initial trench for the garden.

Washington-Lee Children’s Books

Washington-Lee Spanish IB students had to create a children’s book from scratch. They wrote a short story, illustrated it, and created a hand puppet to go with it. They put together the book with numbered pages, and an illustrated hard cover. They presented it to their classmates using their puppet for dramatization.