RAFT Hands-On Education

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.

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

I was excited as soon as I saw the new RAFT Activity Kit " Solar Collector " on the night of the RAFT fundraiser. I spent the rest of the evening sharing my enthusiasm with the patrons who stopped by for a passport stamp. Here's why... My textbook describes the scientific method using wind turbine efficiency. Currently I pay $200 for a wind turbine kit that serves only 4 students for a total expenditure of $2,000 per year for 10 kits. In contrast, the new RAFT Activity Kit will allow each of my 155 - 160 students to create their own wind turbine for under $50 - what a tremendous cost savings each year! In addition, the new RAFT Activity Kit will allow me to include the new NGSS standards on energy and engineering, because the students will learn about solar collectors and create a mathematical model for measuring the efficiency of their wind turbine design. So, RAFT worked its magic once again. I felt like RAFT held a fundraiser just for me, because with the m

Deborah Jacobstein proudly displays her students' art works made with RAFT materials! Deborah Jacobstein, one of RAFT ’s longstanding members, has found beautiful, artistic and highly innovative ways to repurpose RAFT materials like cork and matt boards, double sided sticky papers, die cuts, pill bottles, bottle top lids and many more into Judaica – artifacts connected to decorative Jewish ritual objects. Cork boards give life to sandy floors in a miniature sukkah (a temporary hut created during the festival of Sukkot) while bottle top lids become the feet for many things. Ordinary white pill bottles transform into colorful, scented Havdallah spice bottles--these spice bottles are used at the end of the Sabbath to remind Jews of its sweetness. The list goes on! RAFT inspired Tzedakah boxes This art educator teaches students from preschool to eighth grade at Temple Emanu-El ’s Religious School art program. Temple Emanu-El, one of the oldest Reform Jewish congregations o