Cardboard Boxes Turned into Boxes
“Aren’t we just cutting up boxes so students can build them back into boxes?” I was working with a 3rd grade teacher on a lesson for the NGSS performance expectation:
3-ESS3-1. Make a claim about the merit of a design solution that reduces the impacts of a weather-related hazard.
Students were building models of weather-resistant houses from pieces of cardboard. I was busy cutting up a pile of cardboard boxes along the seams when the teacher asked me this question. I paused. We were doing exactly what she was asking about.
Lighthouse School Maker Faire
By Hetgar Peralta, 11th grade at Lighthouse, Intern at the Wonderful Idea Co.
The Lighthouse School Maker Faire is an event that happens every year at Lighthouse around the end of the school year. The students have a chance to present their projects from their classes, to show their fellow peers or any visitor what the student made. It doesn’t matter if your in 4th grade or in 12th grade, if you have a wonderful project, you can attend the Lighthouse School Maker Faire.
Making in 1st Grade: The Cardboard Box Schoolhouse
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 today. When she finished reading, she asked students, “What items from our classroom would you want to take with you, if you could go back to an old, one-room schoolhouse?” The students were silent. “They just sat there on the carpet, staring at me,” she told me. “No one was talking.”
Vision Quilt: Teens Educate About Gun Violence
Vision Quilt is a volunteer-based, grassroots organization from Oregon. Their members are teachers, business owners, parents, artists, social workers, journalists, retirees and gun owners. Last year, founder and Executive Director Cathy deForest visited Lighthouse and collaborated with 7th and 8th grade students and teachers as they studied gun violence.
Finding Common Ground
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 connections among the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The expedition culminated in podcasts written, performed, and produced by the students. More
Making @ School: Earthquakes and Housing
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. More
Woodworking with All Ages
One of the many variations of Lodestar compared to traditional schools is that our Elementary Making, Art, & Design teacher, Ms. Ortiz, instructs mixed age groups, with students from kindergarten up to 3rd grade. This construct can make teaching structured lessons difficult in a classroom where students’ ages range from 5 years old to 8 years old. However, for the past quarter, students in Ms. Ortiz’s classes have completed a project in woodworking. This post will outline the framing and presentation of this project. More
Rolling Out Project Kits
As described in my previous post on the evolution of the Lodestar Lab Makerspace, we have started the introduction of project kits, which are portable tinkering activities that have proved ideal for our site! These kits developed after months of brainstorming and planning – determining appropriate activities, sourcing materials, and testing out the projects. In the end, we created about 2 kits for each activity, where each kit can be used by 4-6 students. However, the ones we’ve created are by no means finalized – they are just the first step. This post documents our successes and challenges with using our project kits thus far. More
Portfolio Day @ Lighthouse
In our ongoing meeting of Portfolio Development and Career Pathways, we planned a Presentation Day for Middle-School during our School Assembly, and finalized a Portfolio Feedback Day for our High School Students.
Make, Break, Create
Here at Lodestar, our structure is continually evolving – there are always areas we can improve upon to better serve our students. The Lab makerspace is one of them. Initially, we planned to keep the makerspace inside of the K-3 Learning Lab, with one area devoted to free making, and another to independent kits. However, the organization and roll out of these kits proved to be difficult – we want to balance giving students a strong foundation for the activities with enough room for independent learning. At this point, we hit a roadblock with our initial layout – there were not enough space or people available to accomplish our goals. Additional problems followed: Ms. Ortiz, a Making, Art, & Design teacher, did not have enough time to run the space; transporting materials up and down stairs from classrooms to the Lab was not sustainable; and the activities created more noise than we wanted.