RAFT Hands-On Education

“The cultivation of flowers and trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful and the ennobling in man, and for one, I wish to see this culture become universal.” Those words, from J. Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day, got me thinking about how caring for trees and respecting all living things greatly impact future generations. National Arbor Day (held this year on April 27th) is an annual observance celebrating the role of trees in our lives and promoting tree planting and care. This holiday was first observed in 1872, in Nebraska, but tree planting festivals are as old as civilization. Trees have appeared throughout history as the symbol of life and hope. As teachers, we can encourage students to appreciate trees, nature, and all living things for future generations to enjoy! Here are a few STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) ideas to help you spread agricultural information and enthusiasm for trees on Arbor Day with your students: SCIE...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

Ocala Cluster teachers having fun with the RAFT Activity Kits Resource Area For Teaching recently held a professional development workshop on hands-on teaching techniques for elementary and middle school educators across the Ocala Cluster in the Alum Rock Unified School District (ARUSD) . The workshop is part of the ongoing science program conducted by RAFT in collaboration with the Youth Science Institute (YSI) and ARUSD . RAFT and YSI have partnered together to support the teachers from the District’s Ocala Cluster of Caselle , Ryan and Rogers Elementary School s and Ocala Middle School , with the tools and techniques required to spark imaginations and fuel minds. “It's great to be part of this partnership that's bringing RAFT Activity Kits and YSI programs into Ocala Cluster classrooms with lessons that complement each other,” says Ken Sakoi, Education Director at YSI. The RAFT Breadboard circuit These professional development tools and hands on techniqu...

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! ...

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, ...

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...

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...