America Recycles Day: Finding Solutions to Authentic Issues
My students need a variety of STEAM related tools such as Osmo, Lego WeDo, and littleBits for exploring and solving authentic environmental issues in our school.
Our school is a Green School, which means that our teachers and students all work on environmental lessons and projects throughout the year. In our library, we host a weekly makerspace where students explore a variety of tools and create inventions or problem solutions with them.
Our school is a Title I PreK-5th grade school that serves approximately 600 students.
Our school library collaborates with every classroom in the school to offer innovative projects. Some of our biggest goals in the library are to allow students the opportunity to dream, tinker, create, and share as well as empower their voice to think and act globally. We often connect with schools, authors, and developers via Skype and Google Hangouts in order to allow our students to share their work with authentic audiences as well as collaborate globally.
In our library makerspace, we collaborate with a college class who works with students every Tuesday and Thursday. Students throughout the school have access to the makerspace no matter what their age or grade level.
My Project
Each year on November 5th is America Recycles Day. Last year, we connected with schools via Skype to share an authentic recycling problem in our school and have them brainstorm possible solutions for us. We in turn did the same for a problem in their school. We took their possible solutions and put them into action in our own school which resulted in a music video being created about recycling as well as new recycling containers and signs throughout the school.
This year, we want to use our weekly makerspace time to identify authentic environmental issues in our school ahead of America Recycles Day. We want students to use tools in the makerspace along with their own ideas and creations to come up with possible solutions to these authentic issues. Students will use Osmo to draw up possible sketches of inventions and use robotics, 3D printing, and littlebits to tinker with possible inventions. Students will begin putting their ideas into practice and share those with other schools.
I think that increasing the amount of tools available to tools in the makerspace will give them more opportunities to tackle authentic environmental problems in our school and empower their voices to be changemakers in our school.
I want this project to move our makerspace time beyond just a time to tinker into a time to invent and create change in our school. I can't wait to see what the students create and what they share with schools around the country and globe.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Plemmons and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
