For the past few months, Lodestar had the opportunity to partner with the Wonderful Idea Co. (WICO), a local organization that hosts trainings and develops interactive, hands-on exhibits for makerspaces and museums. With the help of a generous grant from Cognizant, we’ve been able to offer our school as a testing location, where WICO can…
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…
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,…
These are a relatively new addition to our Creativity Lab, but they’ve been incredibly helpful. We installed these cord reels into our ceilings for easy access to power outlets, without the fuss of tangled extension cords that our students (and teachers!) are likely to trip over. These reels work something like window blinds: when not in…
Bringing Making Into the Classroom!
Our wall of materials gets photographed pretty frequently by visitors who want to know what we keep on-hand for our making, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. We store most of our materials in clear, plastic bins. These are color-coded by general making activity, and age range. Materials like white glue get stored…
During the holiday break the Creativity Lab decided to take advantage of the student-free time by transforming the already awesome makerspace we’ve built, to an even more student-friendly place. The golden rule in organization is this: in the end everything has a place, within the place it functions. To break this down a little, here…