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 ...

Here is a creative idea from Arlene Brown, a science teacher at St. Mary's School in Los Gatos: "Each year I teach my first-graders about weather, and this year I decided to have them build their own rain gauges. I came to RAFT in search of rain gauges, and what I found were giant syringes (with no needles) that turned out to be perfect for this project!  At 17 cents apiece, I was able to have all 36 students create rain gauges for less than 7 dollars. In class, the students took one look at my sample and knew exactly what to do.  They were very excited about this project! They put a pointed stick in the small end of the syringe to plug the hole and keep the gauge vertical. Now all we needed was rain... thankfully, Mother Nature cooperated by providing a rare rainstorm at just the right time! That night, parents had a great time helping their children set up their rain gauges.  The students could not wait to go out in the morning to see how much water they collected! ...

With Valentine’s Day round the corner, one of RAFT ’s upcoming weekend workshops – ‘Shrink Art Fun’ shows you how to recycle plastic into awesome shrink art! This year learn how to make some meaningful gifts using donated plastic material, available at RAFT in the form of trays and take-out containers, thus preventing them from ending up in a landfill.  Shrink plastics encourage creativity, and can be used to supplement a variety of classroom activities.  Students can create models, manipulatives, and displays. They can make maps, pins, book report characters, and even cards!  But there is also a science behind this hands on art form! Says Instructor Georgina Patterson, who has been in the education field for 40 years, “The science behind the shrinkage process is a chemistry lesson in itself, and the excitement young children get when they watch the plastic change size in the oven is worth the effort!” The base material consists of thin, flexible polystyrene plast...

While Geometry often describes and measures shapes like a cone, sphere or triangle, does it define the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree? Starfish and Broccoli are a few examples of fractal patterns in nature! It does! Most patterns in nature, called “ fractals ” describe curves, surfaces and objects that have some very peculiar properties so irregular and fragmented, that it takes more than spheres, cones, circles, triangles, smooth or straight lines to describe them! These fractals might resemble arteries, coral, a heart, a brain, tree branches and other such ‘designs’ that have symmetry, ‘self-similarity’ and are scale-free! Fern fractals - with symmetry and self -similarity!  Look around you – Fractals are everywhere!  Have fun with us and discover everyday Fractals at the upcoming RAFT workshop ‘Fractals and Beyond’ on Feb 9th, at RAFT San Jose . This workshop will demonstrate how fractals can be related to Sierpinski's gasket, to pa...

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...