MOEMS — Math Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools (MOEMS – http://www.moems.org) is a large and popular mathematics problem solving competition for students in grades 4-8, run by a non-profit organization. Last year nearly 170,000 students from 6,000 teams worldwide participated in the Olympiads. All 50 states and about 30 other countries were represented.
Our own French Math Teacher, Nicolas Giot, organized a MOEMS tournament on our campus on Friday, April 13, inviting students and teachers from two local independent schools, The Grauer School and Warren Walker School to participate. Altogether, we had 6 teams of 5 to 6 students, along with their math teachers. It is worth noting that the MOEMS competition is for teams, not for individuals, and that each team today was composed of members from each of the three schools.
Beyond the mathematical component, the tournament strengthened the links between our schools, created an opportunity for students who did not know each other to develop their collaborative skills by working together to solve problems, and opened the door for new friendships to begin.
MOEMS GOALS as explained on www.moems.org:
On Saturday April 28th Alex Llewellyn Smith and Nicolas Fischer competed in the San Diego Air and Space Museum’s Fly Your Ride Competition.
The goal of the event was to have a vehicle that could jump the biggest gap while staying within the course. The vehicle had to go down a six foot ramp, jump over the gap, land on the ramp on the other side and not run off the sides. To add to the challenge students had to design their own vehicle that had to be constructed without any prefabricated designs or have any sort of motors. Also the entire vehicle had to fit in a large show box and be created on a budget of less than $30.
Nicolas and Alex were excellent representatives of SDFAS. Their car jumped far enough, but had troubles staying on a straight path. We learned a lot from watching the teams that had tons of experience with this event and are ready to apply our knowledge to next year’s designs.
(Ms. Jacoway)
8th grade: Discovering Persian classical melody and percussion with Musician Kourosh Taghavi
7th grade: collaborative art piece, working in the sun
On April 5, 2018, all 6th and 7th graders took part of a French Writing Contest. Their task was to create a novel using the annual “words of the Francophonie”. A set of two pictures were presented to them, as a kick start to their inspiration and creativity.
On Wednesday, April 4, 2018, 7th and 8th graders visited the San Diego Library downtown. The field trip was linked to activities and projects in class, and aimed at developing awareness to media literacy, and research methodology. Thank you, Ms. Addo, for taking the lead and providing students with a purposeful activity that widen students ‘ perspective on how to find, select and use resources.
