RAFT Hands-On Education

As part of the forces and motion unit my students had the opportunity to play around with the RAFT Retractor Car Activity Kit . The modified activity [available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/17grd41wMyBj7kjTaZgBZk7x-trCcrDeQxNyx1LWYRhc/pub] involved the students building the vehicle [as specified by the project page] then deciding what they wanted to test. Students had several options: how will the car perform over various surface types? how might the speed or distance be impacted if the car has to travel up an incline? how would increasing the mass on the car impact the speed or distance the car travels? how could the design be adjusted to make the car go further or faster? As usual, only one person selected to try this activity, at least until the rest of the students saw the car cruise across the classroom floor. Thank goodness for those students who are ‘early adopters’ and willing to try something unknown. In the end there were several groups who performed the surf...

using the RAFT shake table capture your student's imagination and interest in plate tectonics and earthquakes! ‘Nothing was going right for Alice today. Her socks didn’t match in the morning, she left her homework at home and was admonished by her 6th grade teacher…and now Alice ended up leaving her glasses at school! How could she see? Her mom has left her a note on the refrigerator, but Alice couldn’t read without her glasses. Alice tries to call her mom on the cell phone to take her back to school but her mom wasn’t picking up her phone! Then her friend Felicia walks in asking Alice to explain some class notes. Alice was a whiz at explaining and wanted to help her friend but she didn’t have her glasses. Alice then had an idea…she put a plain plastic sheet on the notes and put some drops of water on the sheet and magically the words were legible!’ With this story you can strike a chord with your students and explain the concept of magnification - as light goes through a d...

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...

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...

"Chromatography" "Liquefaction" "Regurgitation" These are just a few of the amazing words that thirty middle school students used with casual precision during their presentations at the RAFT Citizen Schools WOW event, held at RAFT Redwood City . For the students, the WOW event marked the completion of a 10-week after-school program. For Citizen Schools and RAFT , it marked the beginning of a promising new collaboration to expand the use of ‘hands-on’ activities in after-school programs. Students at Kennedy Middle School completed 16 ‘hands-on’ activities in the course of their "Crime Scene Investigation" program. The instructor skillfully wove together RAFT activities on fingerprinting, DNA, color analysis, and more. During the WOW event, students presented a fictitious crime, and challenged the audience to use RAFT activities to discover the criminal. For example, ink from a pen used to write a threatening note could be traced back ...

At the RAFT Homeschooling Open House held last month, we were pleased to welcome both first time visitors and veteran members of the home school community. As visitors signed in, we chatted and I thanked them for coming out on a rainy evening. Their gracious responses voiced their acknowledgement of RAFT as a hub of the education community: • ”Thanks to RAFT for having this event!” • ”Thank you for recognizing us as educators.” • “We face some of the same challenges as classroom teachers.” • ”It’s nice to be part of this larger community of educators” Whether you teach a class of one that may be your own child or a classroom filled with students, what is it about RAFT that appeals to a wide range of educators? I asked a few of our guests this question. The response of one home school educator provides the best clue -- “All children learn differently. There should be room to explore many different teaching models and, if you can, match the model that best meets the need of each child.”...

Many educators have been utilizing all kinds of recycled, upcycled and found materials for decades to explain concepts in classrooms. Today many instructors in schools, learning centers, or parents/ caregivers want to use common, readily found and affordable materials as teaching tools. Educators now have access to resource centers like Resource Area for Teaching (RAFT) that provides a platform for teaching resources and materials that they can use to bring concepts alive for students. Not only classroom students, but Girls and Boys Clubs and Scouts, Campfire Girls, After School programs (ASPs), preschools and daycare all benefit from more hands-on education. Hands-on method of teaching helps the educator to be flexible, creative, challenging, and collaborative with students – all the necessary skills needed in the 21st century. Many homeschooling and teachers’ resource sites have idea sheets, lesson plans, activity kits and recommended age ranges for hands-on learning. RAFT is on...

At the Discovery Days of the Bay Area Science festival held over the last couple of weeks, Chevron, demonstrated and gave away hundreds of hands-on RAFT Activity Kits to a wide variety of eager young students. One of the events was at the Cal State East Bay campus in Hayward. This successful event provided students and teachers with clever hands-on, solid STEM learning, by discovering the fun creative techniques that make learning really meaningful! Over 1,500 young people visited the Chevron tent where they got to learn about self-similar patterns in nature while making their own amazing fractal patterns with paint and CD cases from the RAFT Freaky Fractals Activity Kit ! The tent was continually packed with enthusiastic kids eager to make these fractal designs and they left with a variety of RAFT Activity Kits that cleverly illustrate STEM concepts from why our eyes see color (Black And White makes Color Activity Kit) , how light separates into color spectrums ( The Colors of Light ...