New Stuff for the New Year

What a busy start to the new year!  It's going great but I feel like it's already blowing by.  I changed up a few things in my room this year, getting it ready to start Choice-Based Art classes with my 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades.  I'm excited about letting the kids loose with the materials as they drive their own learning.  Our STEAM initiative has morphed a bit--rather than having STEAM classes that meet as a separate entity from our other classes, they are now attached to the grade levels' science and social studies classes.  Incorporating PBL (Project Based Learning) into teaching has been a big push at our school, and it's a perfect mix with our STEAM classes.  I feel like I'm living in buzz-word land some days! 

So many students have begged me to do Engineering projects that I am going to give an engineering project to each grade level at some point in the year.  Last year's classes were so much fun and the kids got so much out of it!  We'll tag it "Engineering Design" so that it meets criteria for Art as well as Science.  Gotta love that mix.  I'll take it any day!

The research center has a great mix of books, to use for inspiration
in researching on the iPads and computers.

With the startup of Choice-Based Art in my classroom for my older students, I've tweaked my classroom a bit to handle movement between studios.  Got rid of some extraneous furniture (including a set of shelves under which a boatload of termites were happily munching), and set things up to handle the storage of works in progress.  I've also got a research center now, and students will plan their projects using books, computers, and iPads. 

Drawing stations are set up as we open up the drawing studio in a couple of weeks.

Activities are on the board if you get finished early.

I set my easel up so students can see a painting changing.  When I began,
it was just an underpainting.  Slowly it is morphing.  They love to
see and point out the changes.

 I really love the new stools we just got.  They take up so much less space, are waaaaayyyy quieter than chairs, and allow students some freedom of movement that they did not have before.  Many of my students like to stand while they work, and it's way easier to stick them under the table if they want to stand.

I'm excited about Choice-Based Art.  I'll be posting on that pretty soon. 

STEAM is Here and It's Wonderful!

The school year has started off with such excitement as we bring the STEAM model aboard at Roswell North.  I'm lucky to have a 5th grade class of 20 students every day, learning about physics and making all kinds of neat things.  We have launched rockets and collected data about distance, mean, and range, and we've speculated about how to change things like aerodynamics and trajectory to make our rockets go further.

Our latest project has been kite building, and we're investigating how best to get lift to push our kites into the sky.  What is the best design when there is little wind?  When there is a lot of wind?  How can we construct a kite that will not only go high, but survive if it is really windy, or if we crash?  What are the weaknesses of our materials?  What is our point of failure, and how can we improve what we have built?  What does success really mean as we are learning about the qualities of a good kite?

The students have been doing a great job of building and documenting their work.  We've learned about the Engineering Design Process and why it is important for us to approach our projects with this model.  I love hearing the students using their physics vocabulary as they work on their designs and try them out.  This has been such a great process for us all!

STEAMing Forward

I'm passionate about STEAM.  Not condensating water, but Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math.  I think it's short-sighted to call for STEM without adding Art into the mix--if you look at Bloom's Taxonomy, it's been revamped, and Creativity is at the top.  The apex.  The penultimate.  It's what we are supposed to be racing toward, spiraling to that self-actualizing goal of creative thinking.  Thinking outside the box.

Where else are you going to find that, than in an Art classroom?  Every day Art teachers challenge their students to think in new ways, solve problems, and find ways around obstacles.  Art class is a soup of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. 

Our first graders got a chance to talk technology recently.  We began with a huge conversation about what I didn't have growing up--no microwave, no cell phone, no Internet or computers in our homes, no dvds, no iPads, iPods, iTouches, iPhones, i-anything!  And oh my, we actually played outside until dark and we didn't like to be indoors.  Go figure.  The First graders were mystified.  Did you have tv?  Did you have indoor plumbing?  Did you have cars?  Take it easy kiddos, I'm not THAT old.  My growing up years sounded like the cave days to them.

But we did get a good chance to talk about the very technologies that have occurred in their lifetimes, like the advent of the iPad and tablets.  We discussed robotic arms that do surgery for doctors and robots that build cars and the role of engineering in all of the cool technology that comes our way every day.  We decided that we liked the robot thing a lot--and that it would be really neat if we had our own personal robots to do things for us.  What if we had a robot who would clean our room for us?  Or take out the trash?  Or clean the kitty litter box?  I wanted a robot to clean up all the Art room messes!  And so we became engineers.



My robot is ready to clean the Art Room.



First, we designed robots in our sketchbooks, and wrote what they did for us.  The next week we came in and talked about technology some more, and how we could use found objects to create a different kind of robot than the one we drew--one that was made from stamping our lines with the found objects.  Below you will find some of the results of our endeavors.  Our first grade engineers really rocked the house with their stamped out bots.  Way to go, First Grade.  Take a look:

Mrs. Maples' class, stamping their robots.

Great job, First Grade Engineers!  We are ready to get our robots working for us.