Wow! October definitely flew by this year! We have been so busy in the WHAM Fab Lab learning animation with the big kids and the littles have been practicing their Chromebook skills. More about that later but I have to share these pictures with you. The week of Halloween we knew the kids would have some extra energy so Mrs. Lakvold and I planned a fun engineering challenge for the kids. It was amazing to watch the different age levels and how they approached the challenge. The littles (Kinder through 2nd) practiced working with a partner. They wanted to make their "own" broom and having to share the pieces with another kid was a bit uncomfortable at first. The older kids had good communication skills but needed more practice sharing ideas with other groups. I stopped the project halfway through and encouraged them to look around at what other groups were doing that was successful. They initially thought that sharing ideas was cheating but I explained that sometimes when all of our brains are working together instead of in competition we can come up with THE truly best ideas.
I ended the lesson by talking about my first goal of this lesson-the impact of working with a partner and practicing kindness. The other goal of this lesson was NOT to make a thing (broom) but to practice what it feels like to try challenging things. What does it feel like to get frustrated when working on a project? How can we handle this feeling? I used an Exit Ticket at the end of the lesson to encourage the Bigs (3-5) to analyze their work as a partner. They were very insightful in their analysis of their own work as a partner. It is my belief that these skills (perseverance and kindness) will take our kids far in life. The more practice we can give them in using and evaluating these skills the bigger and longer lasting our impact at WHAM will be. I think about the kids going on to middle school, high school, college, and life and how these skills will benefit them and help them have a truly happy life. So the pictures below show the kids making strong brooms that can hold a lot of candy but most importantly, there was some real practice being a good human going on as well. |
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