News

Celebrating The Greatest Story Ever Told!

With Easter right around the corner, third graders celebrated the story of the resurrection of Jesus in a meaningful and colorful way. Each week, our Bible curriculum includes PowerPoint presentations where the lesson has the weekly Bible memory verse and the daily message. The goal in putting these lessons together was to help the students understand the material and, more importantly, help them understand how to walk out their faith in Christ.

And what better way to tell the greatest story ever, then to add some color? To give students a visual reminder of the Easter lessons, we used watercolors and stick-on symbols to decorate twelve Easter egg templates that told different parts of the Easter story and posted them on the bulletin board. Underneath each egg, we posted a scripture passage that explains the symbols that we used. Each day, the students were excited to talk about the symbol and several commented that they like to take their work home to hang in their room so they can remember the lessons! As I step out of teaching this year, I want more than anything for these seeds to grow in the students’ hearts and, eventually, to yield much fruit!

Rockets, DNA & Fabulously Fun Learning In STEM

Last week the sixth and seventh grade students concluded their units on the universe and DNA and in a fun way! 

Sixth graders concluded a unit on the universe. They studied the planets, stars, space history and space travel/rocketry. On day one, the students' task was to make a rocket out of construction paper, card stock or printer paper which could then be launched via air pressure. The rockets were launched at the beginning of class on day two and then the students returned to class to make modifications in the hope to improve rocket performance. On day three, they wrapped up their modifications and relaunched the rockets. The students then evaluated the effectiveness of their modifications in terms of rocket performance. They did awesome! Five rockets landed on the roof of the ECBC sanctuary!

The seventh grade classes were also participating in hands-on learning. Their class had been learning about the structure and function of DNA along with genetics. They were able to see this through a lab that extracted strawberry (plant) DNA. They used hands-on procedures to break through the barriers of a plant cell (cell wall) and isolate and observe actual DNA molecules from strawberry fruit. Although the double helix shape of DNA is not observed, the millions of strands together are observed! It’s pretty cool!