Duck, Duck...Ratios!
The Teal Band has covered a lot of ground in the last couple weeks. Everything from plucking ducks to calculating speed.The band has continued to analyze the data they have collected with their "Getting to School" questionnaire. Information such as how many students per band travel to school by car, compared to how many of their parents was recorded. Huxley and Nora found that the graph of the students followed a very similar pattern to that of the graph recording the parents' information. A number of Teal Banders, including Piper, Freddie, Aurora, and Selina, learned to use Google Maps to create maps documenting where everyone comes from. This information was also used to find the geographical midpoint of all the locations in hopes of determining the "ideal" location of Brightworks geographically.
Further work was done using the data to calculate the average speed it takes certain students to get to school in the morning. Since the travel time for each student was not provided as an hour, but instead in the various number of minutes it takes them to commute to school, the Teal Band had to figure out how to convert their speed to miles per hour. Similarities began popping up around the different modes of transportation, along with their distance from school, in relation to their average speed.
Stepping back into history a bit, the Teal Band took a look at San Francisco's transit history. They spent an afternoon exploring a timeline of events and recorded the events that stuck out most to them. They were intrigued to see how the cost of San Francisco transit has changed over the years and researched inflation rates, adjusting a number of the costs to compare them to today. They were quite surprised to see how much more expensive it was to take transit in the past compared to today.
The band took a field trip down to the San Francisco Railway Museum where they received a lesson on driving one the earliest San Francisco street cars. Something that the band didn't expect to learn that day, was that the older street cars had 'people-catchers,' like the cow-catchers on locomotives. Jaywalking was extremely common during that time and before the 'people-catchers' were added to the street cars, people would be hit and run over often. The 'people-catchers' saved many lives.
The Teal and Orange band took a little break from their usual "By Land" routines to pluck and eviscerate two ducks (with one of them eventually becoming my Thanksgiving dinner.) The experience of plucking the ducks was exciting. There were so many different sized and colored feathers. The down was so incredibly soft. And, no one will ever forget the "bloody worm" that would emerge from the pinfeathers (developing feathers) when the quill was squeezed. Once the plucking was complete, a process that took patience and thoroughness, the band had a lesson on the evisceration of both ducks. They got to see, feel, and smell a number of organs, including the heart, lungs, intestines, gizzard, and liver. The female duck provided the most interesting discovery, the egg production chain.
The ducks not only provided a biology lesson and food, but also a math lesson on ratios. The band worked together to figure how they wanted to sort the massive pile of feathers. They decided to sort them into three groups by size: small, medium, and large. After counting each of the groups, they explored ratios, a comparison of two different quantities. It was interesting to find that while there were only twice as many medium feathers as there were large, there were seven times as many small feathers as large feathers. Taking the ratios a bit further, the band converted them to fractions and discussed the relationships of ratios, fractions, decimals, and percents, along with where we tend to see or use each form every day.
The Teal Band began its group project of Brightworks on a Bus (BOAB.) The launch of the process began with a brainstorm on what it is that makes Brightworks, Brightworks, and organizing the ideas into three main categories; ideas, objects, and spaces. Knowing that a bus is quite a lot smaller than the school building itself, the band looked at which spaces could hold multiple functions. After coming up with three main spaces, the band learned to bubble diagram, a freehand diagrammatic drawing made by architects and interior designers to be used for space planning and organization at the preliminary phase of the design process. They each created a couple bubble diagrams, looking at how spaces and functions interacted with one another, before working together to combine multiple ideas. Next steps include drafting designs to scale and building models.
On top of all this, the Teal Band continued to write their novels, and on December 1st, they celebrated the end of the writing period of NaNoWriMo with a visit from the whole Polar Bear Clan. Congrats to all the authors...now to become editors.