One of my goals this year, as I began my first year teaching 2nd grade, was to include regular MakerSpace activities in my classroom. It has been a roaring success!
What Is MakerSpace
For myself I’ve defined MakerSpace as a time and space in our class for the kids to engineer. We need to get better at STEM and the E is for engineering. Since I’m focused on engineering I’m looking for activities that are not science experiments, and not art projects. I want to give the students freedom to design and build without structure but with an end product in mind.
For my sanity I’ve made our MakerSpace activities as challenges where students are given a set of materials and a task to accomplish. The task may be to build the tallest tower possible, or create a musical instrument.
Our First MakerSpace Challenge
We got started right away in the first week of school. After reading and discussing The Three Little Pigs I gave the students a challenge. Build a structure that can stand up to the Big Bad Hairdryer. Pairs of students were given a bag to build with. Some bags had dominoes in them, others sponge squares, and others craft sticks. I chose these materials because I had them in my cupboards. I encourage you to improvise and use whatever you have on hand.
When a group was done building we subjected it to the Big Bad Hairdryer. This always created a crowd. I love the expressions on the kids faces that this second picture caught.
After the Big Bad Hairdryer visited a group, the students could then clean up their materials and trade it in for a bag with different materials in it.
Debrief
After our MakerSpace time we talked a lot about perseverance. The kids shared that it was sometimes hard to work with a partner (they all wanted to build their own house, not work together to build a house). They also said that building with the craft sticks was hard and they wanted to give up.
There were also engineering conversations. There was a consensus that the sponges were the easiest to build with, but not very strong. The kids decided the dominos were the strongest because they were the heaviest. There was a general agreement that the craft sticks weren’t good at anything.
The Verdict
This was the first MakerSpace project for both the kids and I, and it was a complete success.
I learned that groups of 2 are better than groups of 3 if you want all the kids to stay involved.
The kids learned how to persevere. It took considerable encouragement and help to get some of them to keep trying. I also see now (6 months later) how much better the kids have gotten at problem solving and sticking with it.
livesoflearning 