STEAM Carnival Day

I have missed blogging and have no reasons or excuses why I stopped.  I am back and need to catch up on some past events.

One of my favorite days last year was our grade level STEAM Carnival Day.  It was held the last week of school.

We have 16 fifth grade homerooms in our school....yes 16!!!!  That is a lot of teachers and students. We work on teams and I teach math and science.  If every class had 5 games that would be way too many games to manage.  We decided that our carnival could have 40 games.  Each team could submit only 5 games.

My real life Mario!!!  

Kick Off

We gathered our two homerooms together and had a powerpoint introducing carnival games and how they are played; tossing, spinning, aiming, throwing, etc.  The games had to include at least 3 recyclables and the game theme had to incorporate a theme/topic learned during the fifth grade school year.  The photos are examples of games from Google.

Here are a few sheets from the Idea/Planning Step

Designing and Building

Our students broke themselves into groups of 3 and 4.  They planned and designed their games and were given time(about one week) to bring in their recyclables and extra materials.  I was amazed at the creativity and variety of things chosen.  Once we had enough materials we were ready to move on.

Testing and Redesigning

We discussed that there had to be a way of winning the game and it should not be too easy or too hard.  We went through a lot of masking and duct tape!!!  This step lasted a few days.

Sharing

The kids had to present their game to class.  They voted on their top choices based on the criteria. We had a total of 11 games and could only send five to the event.  

Carnival Day

Students were assigned shifts to work games, as kids moved through various stations during the day. We had to control the amount of children that were playing the games and worked out amazingly.

My Favorite Title:  The Red Cups are Coming

   

 I wished I took more pictures...the games were amazing!  The kids had a bracelet with number 1-40 and got punched after playing the game.  They could only play once.  If they won, they got a ticket designed by the students of each game.  Teacher collected tickets and the class with the most tickets won a prize.

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