Over the past two days, I had the pleasure of meeting an inspiring group of educators and financial service providers. Yep – you read right, financial service providers; I was attending the ING Advisor Insight meeting in Las Vegas. The educators in the group were fellow award winners and members of ING’s Educator Advisory Board…
Life Academy recently finished their first round of making projects as part of our collaboration. This project gives students the opportunity to express themselves and create And now, onto soldering
Sewing gives our students so many possibilities to create. This quarter, our Kindergarteners have been learning the basics of sewing using burlap, yarn, and a big plastic needle. Our Kindergarten teachers suggested sewing as the focus for the second quarter because they thought it would be an appropriate challenge for five year-olds and would help…
Families engaged in creative play together – an outcome we want to build as we integrate making into our school’s practices. Recently our fourth grade teachers invited their students and families to engage in creating scribbling machines, circuit boards, and a little bit of tapigami. Scribbling machines are fun – they instantly engage people to…
Continuing their work with sand, kindergarteners were given the opportunity to work with a mixture of sand, water, and corn starch – which will harden and keep its form over time. In order to make the mixture, you have to heat it to activate the properties of the cornstarch. They were also given a variety…
“Getting smarter takes work, just like getting stronger physically or becoming a better ball player does. Sometimes it even hurts! But when you feel your brain becoming smarter, all the hard work is worth it!” (Independent School Magazine) Our 4th graders recently started building a topographical map of California using tapigami. They were each given…
They started with four piles – power sources, simple loads, switches, and complex loads – and by the time their hour of tinkering had passed, our students were expertly connecting multiple circuit elements together, drawing circuit diagrams, and investigating how to make more complicated circuit elements like 7 segment LEDs and potentiometers work. And they…
Our plan for Kindergarten this year is to explore different media each quarter, giving them an opportunity to experience and experiment with a variety of materials. The new group of five-year-olds entering school have been starting with sand and water. We started with dry sand. It didn’t take long to discover that it doesn’t stick…
PBS NewsHour Segment “How Making Stuff Helps Make Science More Appealing For Kids” Look for us at 5:38!