My first week teaching in a Maker Space!  I am beyond excited to learn how to use this space to develop my students' creativity, collaboration skills, communication skills, and design skills.  There are so many new learning tools to use this year: Osmos, Go Pro Cameras, 3D pens, sewing machines, Makey Makey kits, and so much more.  I know I will learn a lot with the students this year.  This is my second grade classes making circuits with Snap Circuit kits and using Lego We Do kits.  They also spent one week exploring Little Bit circuits.  I learned that some of them have Snap Circuits at home but not Little Bits,  Next year, I would like to spend more time on the Little Bits and see what the students can create!

Through Their Eyes

As a back to school activity, I had the 3rd and 4th grade classes brainstorm a list of words to describe the Makerspace.  I combined the lists and put them into Wordle.net to generate a word cloud.  What I got back speaks volumes.  For those not familiar with word clouds, they are visual representations of a text selection.  Unless specifically excluded, all words that show up in the entered text appear somewhere in the design, with words that were entered more frequently showing up larger in the design.  So for these word clouds, the biggest words in each design are words that showed up the most when they were brainstorming - words like FUN, TEAMWORK, LEARNING, TECH, CHALLENGE, BUILD.  It says a lot about how they perceive what we're doing in here, and it validates that they're getting the very things out of it that we'd hoped.

Check out this video of their word clouds!

Introducing Mrs. Benedict

Hello!  My name is Kimberly Benedict, and I am the new library/ media specialist at Summit this year.  I started my career as an educator in 1999.  I was a classroom teacher and media specialist for the School District of Greenfield for most of my career.  I am beyond excited to be part of the Summit team and work with the students during their library/ technology time in the media center and Maker Space.  I look forward to seeing all the wonderfully creative projects the students design and create this year come to life.  My goal is to encourage the students at Summit to be life long learners, readers, thinkers, and creators.  I know it is going to be a great year of researching, learning, dreaming, and building together!

We're on the Move!

You may remember that last year we were awarded a follow up grant from Oconomowoc Public Education Foundation to create mobile makerspace carts for check out and use in the classrooms. Well, here they are!!

Ms. LaGrange, our exceptionally talented art teacher, once agin designed the carts and all of their unique embellishments, and Mr. Jay, the husband of our health room assistant, built them over the summer.  They are gorgeous!

Our goal was to make them as "ready-to-go" as possible, so that teachers could check them out, wheel them in, and be ready to go, so they have fold out tabletop space built in.

We created four themed carts:

The Creativity Cart - filled with all sorts of building, creating, and crafting materials like burlap, sewing materials, yarn, wood, weaving looms, and glue guns.

The Science Cart - filled with simple machine kits, digital microscopes, Marble Run kits, and tools like funnels, pipettes, hand lenses, tweezers, and petri dishes.

The Engineering Cart - containing Legos and K'nex.

The Technology Cart - including 3Doodlers, Osmos, GoPro Cameras, iPads, and Chromebooks.

We're still waiting on some of the equipment to arrive, but I can't wait till they're out around the school and helping teachers integrate the Maker Mindset into their classrooms!

Be a "Maker" all summer!

We are making plans for our first official "Back to School Maker Faire" in September.  The students are encouraged to build things (independently or with their families) during the summer, post to our Facebook page, and then bring the projects in for display on our Back to School night in August so that we can share them during the first few weeks of school.  I'm hoping we will see lots of fun and creative projects!

This is the information going home to families.

Happy Summer Making!!!

2nd Grade Vehicles

Our 2nd Graders just completed a very long and challenging Makerspace project! In science, they were studying force and motion.  They conducted experiments with toy cars and ramps and then wrote lab reports to share their findings.  In the Makerspace, we took the ideas of force and motion and challenged our students to make a vehicle that traveled FASTER or FURTHER than the toy cars in their experiments.  After creating their cars, testing them, fixing them, and testing them again, students made a video using the Explain Everything app on the iPad.  This project was difficult for all but it truly taught our students the importance of planning, testing, and trying again.  They learned that THEY WILL FAIL but each failure was just a chance to make their projects even better.  We often saw students working together to make their vehicles work and collaboration proved to be a very important component in their design process.

Not just for STEAM!

Recently our third graders finished their persuasive writing unit - a unit they've done for years.  This year, however, the teachers decided it was a great opportunity to integrate technology, the Makerspace, and the Design Process into their writing time as well!  Each student was a part of a "cause group" - working to communicate a message about an issue that affected lives outside of their classroom (for example, protecting the environment or being more physically active).  After completing their research, they wrote a presentation to deliver to an audience of families and students at our Celebration of Learning night.

Most groups opted to use technology to help in delivering that presentation (recording a video on the green screen, using the iPads to create a stop-motion animation video, or creating a presentation in Google Slides).

Then they spent some time in the Makerspace, creating a promotional product to convey their message - we talked about, and looked at, lots of logo items that we get at conferences, businesses, etc. that they might use as inspiration (lanyards, bookmarks, brochures, screen cleaners, mugs, pens, and bags, to name a few).  Each group voted on a product and design, then worked furiously to mass produce something that they could hand out to audience members who listened to their presentation.

 Some groups also opted to make wearable items for themselves, so they could further communicate their message - I saw t-shirts, bracelets and bags.

It was a wonderful culminating activity for them - to take all they've learned in the classroom, in the Makerspace, and on the tech devices this year and put them all together for a purpose!  And I LOVED watching the classroom teachers, who a year ago had no idea what a Makerspace was, thinking about ways to integrate both high-tech and low-tech "making" into every part of the school day.