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…
Quarter 1 just ended at Lighthouse. See what Ms. Dobras’ 7th and 8th grade making class have been up to!
Our 4th graders have been hard at work making benches, to close out the school year. Awesome work, guys!
Maker Faire prep is coming along. While the Creativity Lab staff is hard at work getting t-shirts ordered and schedules planned (and more—trust me, there’s quite a bit of work involved), students are working to get their projects wrapped up. I’m dedicating the next few weeks to previewing some of the projects that students will be showing…
In a perfect world I’d sit them all in two long rows, facing each other, scissors in hand, able to look up, across, or over for help and we would walk through cutting tightly curved lines. But what world is perfect anyway? Welcome to making with first graders. As a fun introduction for making Making…
Kids of pretty much any age can use tools. Determining which age groups can use what tools (with what kind of supervision) is the trick. When do you trust someone to use power tools? When do you trust a student to cut without supervision? In this post I will talk about cutting tools used in…
Summer making in the Creativity Lab was wildly successful. It lasted 5 weeks and taught more lessons than can be contained in one digestible blog post so here are a few bites-sized morsels: The impact of concentrated making over time on students is visible. The results include increased confidence, creativity, and resourcefulness. Talking about what…
What do words like woodshop and woodwork bring to mind? For me, it’s always been the hand and power tools one uses that I think of most easily. For kids in some of my afterschool classes, that’s been pretty much the same case. When I asked Kindergartners and 1st and 2nd graders what words came…
Life Academy recently finished their first round of making projects as part of our collaboration. This project gives students the opportunity to express themselves and create And now, onto soldering