“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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
One of the key focuses of a maker-centered classroom or environment is to encourage students to develop a “maker mindset”. But how can educators promote a dispositional shift toward maker empowerment in students? Agency by Design (AbD) has been working on solutions to this question for some time, and in their research, they have developed…
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,…
At Lodestar, the academic year is underway, and with the innovative structures that we are implementing, there is always iteration, all the way down to the level of the structure of our lessons. Across the school, and especially in the Making, Art, and Design classes, we want to jump right into making and tinkering, to…