RAFT Hands-On Education

Did you know that each year on December 4 th in the United States people observe National Dice Day?  Many games use dice as a way to add random challenges by generating numbers from a toss of the dice. The value of the toss is determined by the uppermost face of the die after it has come to rest.             Dice are used as  gambling  devices for games like Craps and are also used in non-gambling  tabletop games. Dice are often used in board games to decide the distance a playing piece will move on the board.  Backgammon and Monopoly are two such board games that use dice.           A traditional die is a  cube , with each of its six faces showing a different number of dots ( pips ) from 1 to 6. When thrown or rolled, the die comes to rest showing on its upper surface a random integer from one to six, each value being equally likely. A variety of similar ...

November 2, 2013 was a day of great excitement!   This year’s Bay Area Science Festival at AT&T Park in San Francisco, sponsored by Chevron, was full of interesting exhibits displaying unique approaches to learning about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). There were lots of robot-based activities for kids to introduce themselves to basic design and programming and other cool make & take experiences.   Throughout the day the sky was filled with sunshine, a few clouds, and an 8-foot wide floating soccer ball powered and steered using remotely controlled fan jets! Novel gadgets and battle bots set aside, the highlight for RAFT was being able to distribute 14,000 activity kits to eager children ready to learn science.   We distributed RAFT’s infamous Hovercrafts, Simple Stethoscopes, Critter Capsules, and Fizzy Rockets.   By far the largest crowd was in the Chevron tent, where thousands of people made the Hovercrafts and Critter Capsules at RA...

Students do best when they are actively engaged in hands-on learning in a classroom environment that fosters social and emotional well-being.  RAFT joins hands with Stanford's Cleo Eulau Center Resilience Consultant, Lisa Medoff, Ph.D., and EnCorps to share ideas and thoughts on how new teachers can best prepare for success in the classroom and in their professional careers.  Teachers are given many ideas on how to foster resilience, to create positive classroom and school communities, and how to promote emotional and social competence.  Motivating students involves preparing goals, addressing communication, engagement, and identifying a positive sense of self.  Hands-on learning benefits students (and teachers) by addressing these concerns through collaborative groupwork, team building, multilevel interactions, active listening and risk taking, engagement, communication and organizational skill building.  These skills promote a positive environme...

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! ...

Want to teach your students about basic electric circuits using hands on methods? Then the “Battery Science -  Light and Power Up the Learning!” RAFT workshop is just the thing for you! The hands on workshop at San Jose RAFT is held tomorrow (February 4th) from 8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. The workshop incorporates newly developed and simplified electrical activities including the redesigned breadboard circuit Activity Kit ! Kids will love to tap into these activities to make things light up, move, and buzz and the learning will build as they make the ‘connections’! The workshop supply bag will include sets of motors, buzzers, bulbs, batteries, wire, and more RAFT Materials so that you can duplicate the activities with your students. The materials can enhance 4th grade lessons on electricity, or be used for enrichment, after school, or summer programs. The workshop is conducted by Michael Pollock who has taught hands on science to elementary students for 25 years. He currently w...

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, ...

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...

My daughter Aruna is all of 3 and half years old and she knows the sheet on our bed is made of millions of threads intricately woven together because she goes around pointing and peering through her huge magnifying glass at everything around her. Aruna was diagnosed with Autism when she was 18 months. From almost no eye contact, speech or any other kind of non-verbal communication to a child who asks a million questions a day about everything around her and even the space above us... yes she has to know the phases of the moon and constellations too… well, she has come along a good measure! Her way of learning however, is different. It is a bit repetitive. So if someone introduces a simple question like "what is this?" she takes the baton and goes around exploring and applying the same question to everything. While the curiosity is well taken care of, the challenge for us has been to introduce new questions and give her hand-on tools to discover the answers. Children who strug...

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.”...

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 ...

Great educators, such as John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, Reggio Emilia, John Holt, and countless other education leaders all agree on one thing: children learn best when they are actively engaged in education, and the best way to engage them is to involve them with hands-on curricula. Especially for lesson plans in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), the best way to make any topic come alive and make the learning memorable, is to bring the students right to the table and get their hands actively moving. Retention is a key element of academic achievement; making lessons memorable is critically necessary. Fun, excitement, appropriate challenges, and solvable problems are all aspects that make the learning of difficult concepts seem easier and their applications more obvious. Comprehension and retention both flow from hands-on learning activities .