RAFT Hands-On Education

The 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics are right around the corner! This worldwide event offers excellent opportunities to use the Olympics to inspire your students to learn about many mathematical concepts such as slope. How can the Olympics help students understand slope? Think of ski slopes! Ask students to watch the Olympics this year on TV and to look for sports that use steep paths (e.g., snowboarding, downhill skiing, alpine skiing, bobsleighing, etc.)! Back in class, have students recreate replica “ski slopes” using sections of white foam board. Place one end of a foam board against a wall with the opposite end touching the floor at an angle so that it forms the hypotenuse of a right triangle (the right angle is between the wall and the floor). Refer to the vertical distance (“rise”) from the floor to where the top edge of the board touches the wall as the y-intercept. Refer to the horizontal distance (“run”) starting at the wall and to the bottom of the board farthest...

RAFT employee, Sylvia lodge, recently made a trip to Kenya and was able to visit a school in a Maasai village. The school employed one teacher who worked with about 59 students ranging form three to twelve years of age. They were having classes under a acacia tree every day while waiting for a one room classroom to be constructed. Through the generosity of RAFT, we were able to donate a few school supplies to each child.   The smiles that emanated from their face truly shows how RAFT can touch the lives of children anywhere in the wold. This experience was on of the highlights of her African trip.

This past year, RAFT members Consuelo Montoya and Carol Muhn took RAFT kits to Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon for the more than 280,000 school-age refugee children not able to attend school. As Carol Muhn recounts, “We taught the teachers at Beyond Association’s Child Labor Protection Center in the Bekaa Valley how to put together the kits. The teachers then took the kits to their classes to share with the students. Beyond Association believes in teaching students in a hands-on format, so the RAFT kits were a perfect fit for their program.” Children ravaged by war and displaced from their homes and schools were given an opportunity for a small measure of normalcy and the joy of learning through kits provided by RAFT— kits underwritten by the generous donations of RAFT’s many supporters. While RAFT is primarily focused on students in the Bay Area, we now know our reach and impact is far more significant. Consuelo and Carol will be returning to Lebanon this year, and they plan...