Recess Pallet Work

It's state testing season at the school. This means I don't meet with some of my student groups. Here's a conversation I had with one third-grade student this morning.

"Dr. Stelck, can I come to the STEAM room during recess?" said the student with a sad demeanor.

"Why?" I asked.

"I don't know," he replied.

"I happen to need some help during recess. Would you be willing to work?"

"Sure, what are you doing?"

"I'm taking apart pallets and need someone to help me take nails out of the boards. Would you like to invite some of your friends?

"Yes."

"Alrighty! I'll see you at recess."

A troop of third-grade boys showed up in my classroom ready to work. I gave them each a hammer and had them get some safety glasses. I took them behind the STEAM room where I had the pallets stored. On the way, a fifth-grade boy, who usually spends his recesses reading, asked if he could join us. "Sure, you know where the safty glasses are," I said.

We gathered a small audience who watched us from the playground. I think I'm going to have more students who will want to join the group tomorrow. I need to find more hammers.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Can Statements for Programming with Scratch

Image
    For second quarter, I put together a coding unit for the 3rd-5th grade classes I teach. I have taught computer programming through various means over the years and decided to use Scratch this year. Students using Scratch can learn to develop their computational thinking and logic skills while actually making a game or an animation. Other software, like code.org, develops these skills while having the students play games. Both avenues of learning have their place.      Scratch has improved over the years and now has tutorials available for the students to learn how some of the command blocks work. As students follow the tutorials they get a basic understanding of the goal or outcome they are trying to achieve and can add embellishments from there.      I developed a rubric for students to map the level of computer programmer they wanted to become. The rubric is a list of "I can" statements related to my unit goals, at the top, and the types of ...
Read more

Wind Tunnels

 Greetings to everyone who is following me. In this series, I am sharing how I design my STEAM curriculum.    Post #1 - The introduction ,  Post #2 - After the topic is chosen ,  and in this post, I will talk about one of my random ideas, wind tunnels. It seems crazy, even to me, that I would be thinking about building wind tunnels with 3-5th grade students during a 14-day unit. Rest assured, this is only an idea. There's no guarantee that I will act upon this idea. However, I did find some good information and resources.  Before I get too excited about wind tunnels, I must let you know, I did flesh out the Next Generation Science Standards that I will cover in this curriculum. Yes, I will share them with you in a later post. They weren't the first thing I thought about, but I know it is necessary to identify them. Enough about the standards and on to wind tunnels.  As I was looking through the books I mentioned in my first post of the series, I came ...
Read more

What Do We Know/Wonder About Aeronautics?

Image
  Designing an Aeronautics Curriculum The introduction After the topic is chosen Wind tunnels Recruiting an Expert Preliminary plans for hosting a paper airplane contest   Next Generation Science Standards that align with this aeronautics curriculum.  Mini-lesson 1 - What do we know/wonder about aeronautics? Activity 1 - Frisbees and boomerangs What Do We Know/Wonder About Aeronautics? On the first day of the unit, each group will participate in an introduction lesson. I use the KWL strategy to access student knowledge and facilitate inquiry. Each class has its own chart. My classroom/makerspace is full, so posting 6 physical charts is difficult. I like using Google Slides to display notes specific to each class. Here's a link to a clean copy of my KWL slides . The KWL chart is made as a master slide. It's not necessary to create the table as a slide theme but I find it easier to use this way. I color-coded the backgrounds to each slide. This is a classroom strategy I use...
Read more