You know the winter holidays are upon us when the Madrigals perform at Bridge Point! The Twelve Days of of Christmas, Texas Style features a misbehavin' heifer that our students absolutely adore and Feliz Navidad is a crowd favorite that invites our students to sing and dance along with the incredibly talented Westlake High School choir. Thank you for filling our school with the spirit and magic of the Holidays!

Powered by imagination, fueled by inspiration, Liquid Nails, French Cleats and a magical maintenance man, our Lego Wall is now ready for action! Get your own giant Lego compatible wall from Slab Dream Lab (next time we'll buy the wall frame too), shoe organizers from Ikea to organize your Legos and let the building begin!

Bridge Point took it's first ever robotics team to the First League Lego (FLL) competition this year. FLL is an amazing event that combines robotics, engineering, creativity, collaboration, programming and research with real-world problems. BPE sent a team of seven 4th graders who all worked to learn all about hydrodynamics and how we find, transport, use, and dispose of water in our world.  Team Lego Roblocks, coached by Ms. Ricketson and parent volunteer Ms. Gewirtzman, built 19 different missions that replicated real-life situations of how we work with water including flushing toilets, fixing broken pipes, and maintaining water treatment plants. They worked together to design an autonomous Lego Mindstorms robot that had to flip over sewer covers, drop off rain barrels, flush toilets, fix pipes, and so much more, all within two minutes! After hours and hours of practice, redesigns, testing fails, broken parts, frustration, enlightenments, perspiration and inspiration, this group put on a skit about how to get more water out to the playground, presented their research, talked about how their team got along and didn't get along, set goals and met their goal of completing two missions successfully at the Robot Game! Check out a team that completed the entire mission! Congratulations to this amazing team of 4th graders, it was an absolute delight to work with you all!

Eanes ISD is hosting it's first ever Student Film Festival this year and it's open to all EISD KG-12th grade students. Students are invited to create original films that focus on SEL (Social-Emotional Learning) with a few twists. How will you move us? To tears, to feel, to laugh, to rise to action? How can we #CHOOSEKIND or how do we feel when we don't? Ask your campus Ed Tech for more information and check out the challenge, rules and regulations on the Festival de Eanes website. 

3rd and 4th grade students were invited to code, load, and go with pint-sized robots during their Hour of Code library lessons with Ms. Ricter. These tiny-but-mighty Ozobot Evos use a visual coding method that works with optical sensors to read Color Codes. Our students programmed these pocket-sized robots to dance, spin and travel through a variety of mazes. Ozobot provides a large lesson library for educators and our students were absolutely mesmerized by these little guys! To learn more about this lesson and other HOC library lessons, check out Ms. Ricter's library blog, The Shelf Life. Ozo-mazing!

Celebrating Computer Science Education Week, I worked with Ms. Rollins' 4th graders to code with Swift Playgrounds on the iPad. The Hour of Code is a nationwide initiative that encourages educators to spend at least one hour programming with students during December. The Swift programming language, created by Apple, is designed to let you see the results of your coding while you are tweaking and working with your code-an amazing feat in the area of programming! Using a technique called Pair Programming, I had students work together to master interactive puzzles starring a fun character named Byte. In Learn to Code 1 & 2, students learn concepts such as commands, debugging, functions, loops, and algorithms-concepts Ms. Rollins was already working on with her classes. After our powerful pairs mastered the Learn to Code 1 Playground, I challenged them to try the Incredible Code Machine.  In this Playground, a machine is missing some parts. Our students had to use logic and basic coding skills, like functions and loops, to figure out how to create new parts for the machine based on different inputs and outputs. Even though this is listed as a middle school challenge, our 4th graders did an amazing job! Way to code 4th graders!

Life begins when you get back up! Ever wonder what happened after poor Humpty fell of of the wall? Find out by reading December's Principal's Book of the Month, After the Fall: How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again by Dan Santat. Read and respond here and don't forget to persevere! https://flipgrid.com/1c1948