Monday, July 22, 2019 - Planning Leads to Productivity

Academic Update: In alignment of Week 4’s theme, Plan for Yourself, Ms. Chen’s Writing class was introduced to a user-friendly online resource to take back to school: GrammarBook.com. To add fun to a better understanding of parts of speech, each student wrote a random word on each of the 6 pieces of paper color-coded for Adjective, Adverb, Preposition, Verb, Proper Noun, and Common Noun. After a lottery-style draw of a folded square of each color, students then arranged their arbitrary words based on their functions to form a grammatically correct--though semantically crazy--sentence, such as “Walter danced happily underneath a creepy bathroom!” or as an example of personification, the attribution of human characteristics to something non-human: “Happily, a bathroom danced underneath creepy Walter!” While having a good laugh about the nonsensical sentences, students learned to differentiate the essential parts of speech in a sentence (noun and verb) from the non-essential. After exploring the definition and sample usage of a part of speech on GrammarBook.com, students then completed a self-quiz to gauge their proficiency--a perfect gift to wrap up because grammar rules are the same no matter where you go!

Activity Update: In Jewelry today, students learned how to make friendship bracelets in the hopes that they might share these friendship bracelets with some of the new friends they have made during their time at Forman Summer. We currently have students from thirteen different states and five different countries. It is wonderful to think that some of these students might receive a little trinket to commemorate the fantastic friendships they have forged during their time here.

Tonight for the evening program, Forman School faculty member, Mr. Chris Ford, engaged students in a design-engineering experiment.  Mr. Ford has been a staple at the Forman School for fifteen years as a Mathematics teacher, Mathematics Department Head, and now as the Director of the school’s Ingenuity Program. The Ingenuity Program is the school’s talent development program in which students pursue various interests, talents and passions in a supportive and structured environment. The emphasis this evening revolved around an interest many Forman students have - design. Small teams were tasked with solving a problem through the use of design as they worked their way through the problem-solving process from storyboarding the consumer experience to the design, function, and aesthetic of an actual product. We are incredibly grateful that Mr. Ford could help students engage with the problem-solving and engineering/design process in such a hands-on, authentic way.

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