Take place in or could be used by grades K-5.
On a sunny afternoon, Mr. Guzmán’s second-grade class was buzzing with the sound of second graders turning the pages of books and whispering words aloud. All along the wall were drawings of cats, people, and other creatures from the children’s book Stone Soup. The kids were connecting the characters and story with the idea of…
Projects using toys are immediately engaging for students, and can provide surprising learning opportunities. Our first grade class had a whole unit on toys; they took apart toy cars to learn about how they worked, built tops (while learning some basic physics concepts), and designed new toys from scratch using a variety of materials.
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…
In this new feature, we will give a quick summary of the different Making projects happening each week throughout the school. We will also spotlight specific projects in more detail in other posts. Read on to learn about all the ways our teachers are integrating Making into our classrooms! The kindergarteners continued a woodworking unit during their…
A couple of weeks ago, Kerri Frederick at La Escuelita Elementary asked us for help setting up their Maker Space. They are another school in the Oakland Unified School District that is partnering with Maker Ed’s VISTA program, and had expected to have two VISTAs arriving before the school year started.
(This post is Part 2 in a series. Part 1.) From making their balancing crayfish, students learned that adding weight to an object makes it more stable, particularly when the weight is distributed more towards the bottom than the top. Having learned this, they moved on to making tops. Building a Top Students began by trying…
For several weeks, our first graders have been exploring concepts like “balance” and “spinning” by building toys. Their making combined experimentation, observation, engineering design, and design thinking. And it went something like this: Building a Balancing Crayfish Calling it a “crayfish” is sorta killing me, being from Louisiana (down there, it’s a “crawfish”), but I guess out here…
Our 4th graders have been hard at work making benches, to close out the school year. Awesome work, guys!
Our kindergarteners are some of our biggest makers at Lighthouse. They make year-round, usually with sewing and woodworking (using handsaws, clamps, drills, and hammers). Now, they are in their second week of testing out a programming unit, and so far it looks like it’s going pretty well. You may recall my Turtle Art posts from several months back. This new…
“What happens when you click ‘forward?’” we asked, referring to an icon on the students’ computer screens. Several kids—mostly those who had seen “Turtle Art” before—raised their hands and said it “makes the turtle go up.” This was the introduction to a programming unit our 5th graders will be working on for several weeks. In “Turtle Art,”…