RAFT Hands-On Education

Don’t lose sleep over this, but Daylight Savings Time (DST) is here! On March 11th it's time to set your clocks forward and say goodbye to one hour of sleep! There’s no time to waste! Make this year’s Daylight Savings Time an engaging and meaningful experience for you and your students. RAFT has plenty of ideas to help you and your students get ready for DST:  “ Time for Shadows ” shows you how to quickly assemble an equatorial sundial that you can quickly adjust for daylight savings time! Learn about sun positions and shadows with drinking straws, a protractor, a compass, and a CD! Use a view binder cover, a watch, a paperclip, straws, the compass, and other easily accessible resources to create a “ View Binder Sundial ” similar to the one our forefathers used to tell time before clocks were invented! Create a sand timer (based on the concept of an hourglass), and learn how to measure time with “Sand Timer Primer.” Why do we have Daylight Savings Time?...

Ten third graders and twelve fourth graders in Kathleen Gould’s class at Orchard School District know to turn to RAFT when making creative design solutions! They’ve been on a 17-day Design Challenge journey studying how wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands of birds each year in North America—making turbines the most menacing form of green energy! Using cardboard tubes, paper pinwheel blades, clay, tape, stickers, cotton balls, bubble wrap, and other RAFT materials, student teams were able to think about and design clever models of wind turbines that might be safer for birds to fly around or nest upon! It started when representatives from the WildLIFE Associates brought into the class rehabilitated falcons, owls, eagles, and other birds damaged by wind turbines. “We learned about Luna the owl, who is now blind in one eye, and Liberty, the bald eagle, who broke its wing from flying into a turbine,” says Gould. Seeing these beautiful wild creatures up close helped the students ...

Rita Mercado, First Grade Teacher, Serendipity School The idea of having parents come into the classroom can be overwhelming at times, but it is an important step in having them gain an understanding of the learning that happens throughout the day that isn’t able to be sent home in the form of checked work or a neat looking project. As I began to incorporate more STEM and STEAM projects into my curriculum, I started thinking about how I could paint a clear picture for the parents about just what it was that we were doing. Of course the idea was introduced at Back to School Night and written about in newsletters, but what else could I do. I invited the parents in for a STEAM Night. After giving a brief introduction on the acronyms and examples of what this looks like in the classroom, the parents were able to move around the room and participate in activities designed for exploration. Once they had a few minutes to play, I posed some questions and challenges...

By Ashley Estes, RAFT Fellow   RAFT is one of the best places to find some amazing premade kits and learning tools. These kits are great and can be used across many grade levels. As a 1 st grade teacher, I use them weekly in my classroom. In this article, I would love to explain one kit in particular that could be easily used with students from Pre-K to 1 st grade. This fantastic kit is called, Laundry Math. This clever and adorable kit comes with sheets that have clotheslines drawn on them, pictures of shirts and pants, 2 sets of numbers 1-10, and Velcro for the items to stick on. This kit helps with counting, 1-1 correspondence, number identification, problem solving, adding, and subtracting. After laminating and placing the Velcro on the pieces, your students are ready to go. The basic idea of this activity kit is students place pieces of clothing on the clothesline and after counting the items; they place the correct number on the sheet (see pictures below). As...

Guest post by  Brittany Coleman, Marketing and Communications Coordinator at Resource Area for Teaching (RAFT) Instead of turning to affordable repurposing, many teachers and after-school providers spend hundreds of dollars of their own money each month on school supplies and activities for learning. But little do they know that the average person generates 4.3 pounds of waste per day. To continue reading, click here.

By Rita Mercado, First Grade Teacher, Serendipity School I have taught first grade for the last 12 years, and it seems like every year I get questions about what we do during our “Choice Time.” The number one thing that my students learn how to do during playtime or choice time is learn how to problem solve. My student’s favorite choice is the blocks. Here you see some children building with blocks, but what else are they doing. They are learning about spatial reasoning, using geometry, comparing heights and inclines, among many other things. Not only are children learning how to share and work together during playtime, but they are becoming the engineers of the future. I often overhear my students discussing how they can change the angle of their ramp to make the cars go faster or how to make their tower taller by building a more stable base. They also like to “shop” around the room to find things to add to their structures. “Let’s use this toilet paper roll to add a tunnel...

On March 29th, the SMCOE STEM fair was held at the Hiller Aviation Museum. Every year, RAFT is allowed to pick a special winner who has demonstrated an exceptional skills in science. The RAFT special award winner this year is Maya Ellis, a fifth grader from Central Middle School in San Carlos!  Maya's physics project, "Shaped for Speed," tested the effect of shape on the performance of boat hulls. She made simple aluminum foil hulls, which she floated in a tub of water. She added a drop of soap to the back of each boat, which propelled it across the tub. Maya is very familiar with the surfactant properties of soap. She tested four designs and discovered two were particularly good. Maya created a fifth design to extend her tests. She also tested both hot and cold water. All in all, Maya is an inquisitive young scientist!  Maya's award was created by one of RAFT's champions, Greg Brown, and was made using recycled materials:    • Surplus aluminum she...

By Michael Rosenberg, Teacher, Stratford School  There are few professions outside of teaching that can empathize with the struggle of being an educator. As a teacher, our days in the classroom can be a physical and mental roller coaster. Then at day’s end, stacks of papers await our pen and stickers, and Bay Area traffic awaits our draining commute home. Facing these issues, the recent addition of a child, and a move far from my campus have increased my need to find balance. However, wrestling with a reasonable balance of work and personal life has been a struggle for most of my career.   Knowing that I had to restructure my life to fit my new struggles, I decided to reevaluate my work and personal life balance. I began this process by first mapping my day which included commute time to and from work, prep-time, and hours spent at home. By experimenting with my commute to work, I found that leaving fifteen minutes earlier allowed me to avoid most of the traffic...

By Elisha Burns, RAFT Fellow Let me be one of the first to say there is an elephant in the room of education and it is called content knowledge.  As a teacher that has spent a few years teaching I can honestly say that the new Common Core curriculum has really opened my eyes to some of my own educational weaknesses. Have you seen some the questions that our students are being asked in the new curriculum? I consider myself an educated person (I do have my Master's degree in Elementary Education), but some of the questions being presented to my students really makes me question my level of content knowledge. It's not that I can't solve the problems, but I find myself spending quite a bit of time working out the problems so that I can teach my students how to tackle them. In the era of Common Core comes the new problem of teacher knowledge, especially in high needs areas. Gone are the days of catchy rhymes and memorizing factoids, the new standards requir...