By Bryan Flaig: At John Gill Elementary, Redwood City School District’s STEAM school in Redwood City, first grade teacher, Joyce K, recently read an informational text to her 1st grade class on the theme of now and long ago. The text compared and contrasted devices people used in the 19th century with the devices we use…
Lodestar’s 6th grade expedition teacher Ms. Einhorn spent the first semester working with her students on their expedition: “Common Ground: Building Religious Tolerance through Human Connection”. Each case study in this expedition was built on the other – students started learning about the events of September 11, 2001 and the resulting Islamophobia; then they developed…
At the culmination of a month-long 3rd and 4th grade Expedition on Natural Occurrences, the Creativity Lab developed two making projects based on Housing and Civil Engineering. Collaborating with 3/4th grade teachers, the Lab created two design challenges focusing on earthquakes and tsunamis, natural occurrences relevant to the Bay Area and California.
Our ongoing meeting of the Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group took place this week, where we discussed connections across the MAD classes, continued our work linked to career pathways, and discussed how to design a Portfolio Experience for our students.
In the third meeting of the Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group we continued feedback and support on Portfolio and Reflection practices, introduced Career Connections and discussed how these can be applied in a cross-curricular way throughout different grades and classes.
In the second meeting for the Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group held last week, we continued to build on our reflection, critique and portfolio practices, and introduced examples of Critique Protocols. As mentioned in the last blog post, the purpose of these meetings is to discuss integrating portfolio work and documentation, possibly in a…
Staff members from the Lighthouse Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group met last week, led by our electives coordinator, Brianna Shahvar, to discuss integrating portfolios and documentation into each of our classes. The purpose of this process is to encourage students to document their own thinking, to look more closely at their projects and/or products,…
We recently had our annual King of the Hill competition with our 12th grade Physics students! Each year our Physics students build mousetrap cars as they begin to study forces and motion. The first round of cars don’t work very well; the students don’t really know yet what it takes to make a durable and…
As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, we have been partnering for a while now with Agency by Design (AbD), a research group out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero. As we dive in to this work, we’ve been exploring ways that making not only creates space for play and creativity in…
For the past month, the 3rd grade classes here at Lighthouse have been exploring a unit on electricity during science. While many lesson plans have students end a unit like this by exploring with and making real circuits, our teachers Lauren Hofmayer and Zoe Sylvester have decided to flip this on it’s head by having have their students…