RAFT Hands-On Education

One of the most important steps in our hands on Activity Kit development process is user testing. We want to test RAFT Activity Kits to ensure we are delivering the best quality product, with easy to understand instructions, and exceptional educational content. We recently invited RAFT members to bring their children, the end users of RAFT products, to be our RAFT Kids Kit Testers for the night. The children were very excited to see the place “where mom gets all her good junk”. We tested Foil Art , Kumihimo , and a brand new Retractor Car. In reaction to completing the retractor car made out of common materials, one child exclaimed, “It REALLY worked!” I received valuable feedback and will take it back to the product development team. It is amazing what you can learn when you see the product with its end user. RAFT prides itself in creating hands on Activity Kits that are made out of common materials so one can actually build these kits on their own! RAFT provides, Idea Sheets, ...

I am an elementary school teacher at Orchard School .  Before the winter holidays I spent three days teaching my class about moon activities that I had learned at a RAFT workshop last summer entitled 'Crafty Moon Activities'.  The lessons I used to introduce the moon to my second and third graders were:  Modeling the Moon’s Rotation, Moon: Nearside-Far side, and Nine and a Half to the Moon.  In these lessons, based on RAFT Idea Sheets , the children learned using movement and hands on materials where and how the moon moves, what it looks like on both sides of the moon, and physically how far the moon is from the earth.   We then talked about the fact that the moon doesn’t change shape, but that the reflection of the sunlight on the moon creates the images that we see at night. To illustrate this point, I used the RAFT Idea Sheet Holding the Moon in Your Hand .  Using a light source and simple RAFT materials like Styrofoam balls with coffee stir s...

Resource Area For teaching (RAFT) recently honored two Bay Area educators with the Hands On Recognition Awards for their emphasis on hands on teaching methods. Ann Shioji, a high school teacher and Anna Pollack, an elementary school teacher were selected in recognition of their exceptional collaborative and inquiry-based teaching projects and activities in the classroom. Shioji’s award winning concept explores how sound travels through different media using a simple watch and various materials like air, water and sand. Says Shioji, “Students place a watch on the table and put bags, each filled with a different material, on top of it. They then listen for any difference in the sound and describe what they hear. It reinforces the concept that sound waves need a m edium to travel through.” Shioji, who teaches Integrated Science at the Yerba Buena High School , was introduced to RAFT by another teacher when she came to the Bay Area. “I taught in Los Angeles for three years. We didn’t ...

RAFT celebrated the Chinese New Year last weekend with over 250 members participating in this fun event. Lucia Quaife, long time RAFT Member has been the backbone of this event, bringing it to life for the past six years. The Year of the Dragon festivities started with master calligrapher Richard Zhao who created beautiful dragon zodiac symbols and other good luck signs traditional in Chinese culture. Keeping with the theme, another RAFT member, Tsen-wu Pang created a magnificent Dragon costume that is still on display in the RAFT San Jose Member Center. She also demonstrated how to make dragon masks using foam, fabric, corrugated paper and many other RAFT materials. Quaife, an educator at the Creative Learning Foundation , a non-profit providing practical Mandarin teaching to non-Chinese-heritage children in the Bay Area, along with her staff, taught members how to make their own healthy and delicious spring rolls. This light refreshment can easily be duplicated in a classro...

On a day when schools were closed to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., nearly 100 adult and youth volunteers joined United Way Silicon Valley and Resource Area For Teaching (RAFT) to make the holiday a “day on” instead of a “day off” by working to improve local education and lending their support to local educators. As part of this nationally recognized King Day of Service, local volunteers assembled hands-on RAFT Activity Kits including ‘Water Beads’, ‘Place your number value’ ! and ‘Catch a falling ring’ and other materials that teachers can use in the classroom to create valuable learning opportunities. “We are partnering with RAFT today because education is a fundamental building block to a successful life,” said Carole Leigh Hutton, president and CEO of United Way Silicon Valley . “Helping teachers enrich the classroom experience supports United Way’s goals of g rowing self-sufficient and financially stable families and reducing the ethnic-racial achievement gap in our sc...

RAFT started the New Year with a high note earning a large number of new reviews and the most page views on Charity Navigator , America's largest independent charity evaluator. RAFT currently enjoys the numero uno position in the Top 10 Non-University Education Charities list with the highest number of page views. RAFT received 1461 hits, around 400 more than DonorsChoose and Scholarship America , who got 1059 and 1030 hits respectively. Charity Navigator in partnership with GreatNonprofits ran an Education Write a Review Campaign to encourage people to share their stories about Education charities. In this recent poll, RAFT took top spot with a total of 37 new reviews. The other non-profit educational organizations in this top 10 included Lee Pesky Learning Center , Citizen Schools , Little Kids Rock and DonorsChoose . These 10 highly-rated charities received the most number of new reviews in September 2011. You can also add your review on Charity Navigator . Charity N...