It's alive! Flynn Elementary- Project Explore

After playing with circuitry in play doughs and magic wands, students were asked to design a toy with at least one simple circuit including an LED, motor, or both.

Eek!  It's a spider!

We spent some time watching PBS Design Squad, including this video of a mechanical engineer with one of the cooler jobs on the planet- designing toys.  But not only adults can design amazing inventions, of course, so videos like the one of these kids were very inspiring.

This took weeks, and the students were extremely committed to their ideas and drawn plans. Sometimes this is good, and it works out that they can make pretty much the thing they designed.  For examples, this student retrofitted a pinwheel to make a fan.

Oooh, so breezy!

 and this student had a dancing crab in mind all along:

Her biggest challenge was that the eyes kept flying off (at *least* a dozen times) when it was going.

 But sometimes the thing you wanted to make doesn't work. Maybe because the circuitry needed exceeded the ability to build it, maybe because it didn't move the way the designer expected, maybe because the initial drawing had to be altered a lot to engineer it to function.

This is where the real flexible thinking and creative solutions happen: maybe it isn't actually what I thought it was.  It's whole purpose is different. Meet the M Bot.

M Bot.

M Bot was supposed to be a vibrating insect with three LEDs underneath.  But M Bot was not good at being an insect, and the young designer struggled a great deal with it. Now, I find it more valuable at that point to not tell the designer how or what to do to make it exactly what he wanted, but instead to ask him what else it could be.

Turns out that instead of a bug, M Bot is a great massaging machine.  Cool, huh?  What terrific flexible thinking. Because at the start of a great many inventions, inventors started out with a different goal than the product with which they ended up.  Things from microwaves to Slinkys are inventions that were not part of the initial goal of the designer.

This little teddy's hand lights up if you squeeze it

An ice skating snowman who glides in little circles across the table

We went to the Kindergarten to show off some of the prototypes in their early phases. The children were especially fond of the crab and this this little robot who draws circles.

In the end, students went back and redrew their diagram to match what they had actually built. It was very neat to compare it to their original plan and see what changes had had to happen.

A sculptural initial with a single LED.  Maybe an application as a nightlight?

A catapult with a single LED. So that it can be fired in the dark, of course.

So many wonderful and varied ideas came out of this session of Project Explore.  The goal is not to produce mechanical engineers or industrial designers (although, come to think of it, go for it kids!) but rather to build tenacious workers, creative problem solvers, confident kids, and flexible thinkers.

Leaf Prints How-to

This is a printmaking lesson on positive and negative space.  It is also a lesson on what to do when the summer is beautiful, the leaves are plentiful, and you just want to celebrate all of this green. With thanks to blogger Cassie Stephens for this marvelous idea.

First, get a kid. I recruited mine to model this for you.  It helps if they like to be messy.  I recommend either a smock or clothes that can get dirty.  On both of you, actually.

We picked some from the woods across from our house, but any leaves will do.

Get your materials ready.... tape down acetate or a non-stretchy plastic bag, like a ziploc. You will also need printing ink (in that tube), a brayer, plain white office paper, and leaves.

Rolling, rolling, rolling!

Roll out about 1-2 T. ink with your brayer. Make sure it's pretty even, no big puddles and no dry spots.

Place them at random, or make a little picture, like from Leafman

Put leaves all over it, vein side down. Also works well with ferns, salad greens, dandelion greens, and flowers too.

Doesn't matter that his fingers are inky and smearing, this is the back.

 Put a plain ol' piece of white office paper on top. Rub the back with flat hands over the entire surface.

At the bottom right here is the negative of the print- the leaves are white, because the ink didn't touch the paper there.

Peel it off. Voila, the "negative" of the image, at right. Repeat again if necessary to take up most of the ink. THEN remove leaves, and put down another piece of paper, and again, rub the back thoroughly.

 

Peel, and be wowed. This is the "positive" of the image.

TA-DA! 5 minutes or so to do. Then give your kid a sink and a bar of soap. Ink stains.

Try displaying them side-by-side for best effect. Mat on 12x18" piece of construction paper and it will give you a tidy colorful border that ups the professional looking quality. Try different colored inks rolled together. Do it with kitchen herbs, like basil and chives. Do it with flowers, or all oak leaves. Use leaves to design a little person, or an animal.

I did this with a whole grade level at RES, taping acetate to tables in the classroom. Connect it to science and life cycles, farm-to-table-to-art-room garden discussions, or to literacy like Lois Ehlert's Leafman.   


Feeling ambitious?  Grow a garden with your child and have them collect leaves from the plants they would need to make, say, pizza sauce, and arrange those tomato, basil, and oregano leaves in a round composition.

 

 Do it at a birthday party, on a rainy day, or because that perfect fall leaf won't last forever if you don't make it into artwork. Have fun!

Ready, set, glow! Project Explore- Flynn Elementary

The Spring 2014 fourth grade group learned about building and integrating simple circuits.  This session was the first time I have taught students about electricity, so it was both really exciting and a learning curve for all of us.

Conductive dough is the blue-grey, insulating dough is lime

We began with making play dough.  The kids broke into four groups and worked from recipes to make either conductive or insulating dough.  Yes, I let them cook it on the stove.  At this point they did not know what they would be doing with the doughs.

(Except for eating it. They all wanted to eat the sugar dough.  They tell me it was delicious.)

Series circuit caterpillar

After discussing a little on how circuits work, and watching some Sylvia's Mini Maker videos, the students experimented with batteries and LEDs to attempt to:
1) Identify through experimenting which dough was conductive and which was insulating
2) Create a series circut
3) Create a parallel circuit

Ta-da!

The next week, after feeling more comfortable with a simple circuit, students made magic wands. They drew a diagram of how it should look, labeling the positives, negatives, battery, etc.  They used sticks, pipe cleaners, button cell batteries, copper tape, electrical tape, a slow changing RedGreenBlue (RGB) LED.  

Thinkers. Tinkerers.

And then, being me, I say Go! And they say, wait, what?  How does this all go together?  Where are my directions?  What goes where? Making an on/off switch was the real bear for most of them. At this point, their faces looked about like this.

Huh?

This is my favorite moment in teaching. Not the Aha! moment, but the Wait a minute, why isn't this working? Look at the cogs turning in that little head.

This is where the real learning happens: It's not working, what other variable can I change?

This is also where the real frustration happens.  And sometimes, the tears: Why isn't it working?  Am I a failure? Maybe I am not good at this.

And then it happens. Sometimes quickly, sometimes not for quite a while. A flicker of light and a little sharp inhale of air.  I saw it!  I did it!  Wait, I can do it again.  I got this, Mrs. Elliott.

Now, add some pizazz to that stick, kids.  This is a magic wand, after all. Do it up with some yarn, ribbon, and cellophane.

And so, naturally, we turned off all the lights and danced around with our color changing magic wands.  Every child in the room was certain they were Harry Potter.
     
But that's not all.  The next week, we added motors to our materials mix.  More on that soon.

Bubble bubble pop! RES

My Kindergarteners and I played a game today with numbers, letters, colors, and bubble wrap. Keeping their hands still prior to the start was, by far, the hardest part!

What's the game already?!  I want to pop these!

The game goes like this.  I call a number or letter, they search for it and pop it.  If a color is called, they can pop any number or letter that color.  The first one with all of their bubbles popped wins.

  

But really, they all win.  Because once someone has finished, they all got to jump up and down on the remaining bubble wrap. And that is definitely a win.

Bubble bubble pop!

 This activity is super for fine motor skills (single finger strength building when they pop a bubble), number, letter, and color recognition, and gross motor skills (jump jump!).

Pure sugary joy! RES

In the last week or two of the year, sometimes art class has free choice stations.  Today first graders could go to stations to work in sketchbooks, paint a watercolor resist, create wearable rings, or make edible necklaces.

Rainbows of yum.

So, if you have ever been to first grade, it's not too hard to guess which station you might choose here.  Yes, they are all good, and yes, there were children who chose the first three.  But edible necklaces?  Sold! 

This is the first time I have offered this in the art room.  In general, I steer far, far away from lessons that could be labeled the art-teacher-shaming "Make-and-Take."  Call me suckered by the nostalgia and the sugar, but making edible necklaces really does offer both great fine motor practice and the opportunity to explore lots of patterns.

Upon hearing about this station today, there were several squeals of delight and much clapping.  And frankly, in mid-June, where we are all a little weary, more joy is what we all need.

Spring 2014 Project Explore- Flynn Elementary

The new mosaic on the fence surrounding the garbage and recycling dumpsters.

Students just wrapped up session 2 of Project Explore's sixth year at Flynn Elementary School. Fourth and fifth grade artists have just finished two mosaics that can beseen outside of the school facing North Avenue. The unlikely seeming location of the murals- on the fence surrounding the garbage and recycling dumpsters- is no mistake. This project was part of a seven-week investigation into reuse as an alternative to disposal.

Left panel

After a field trip to ReSource on Pine Street, learning about reuse artists from around the globe, and collecting unused and broken objects from their own homes, students designed and created the two panels of the mosaic.  (This is the moment when you should Google Tito Ingenieri.  Or just click this  link to see this true world wonder of eco-innovation.)

Right panel

In their presentation of the new artwork, the students wrote “Old stuff isn’t just junk it’s much more, it’s unique. It may look like a pile of nothing but it isn’t, it really is not junk. Just look at it and think to yourself, how much of that ‘junk’ instead of being thrown away, could be re-used to make a piece of art? People don’t often think of what broken items can be used for, and so many things are thrown away. Artwork is just one of the things you can do with broken items to keep waste out of landfills. Basically we want people to know that stuff you might be throwing away can be turned into beautiful art.”

Close up details- bottle caps, poker chips, fake flowers, smashed tiles, picture frame scraps, bits from old board games

Project Explore is Flynn Elementary School’s grant and donation-funded interdisciplinary arts enrichment program, and has just completed its sixth year in operation. Students utilize the arts as a vehicle to promote higher-level thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation to approach problems of global significance, such as waste disposal. Using the arts as a creative avenue that reaches beyond the classroom, each session focuses on a particular content area, such as science, mathematics, or writing, uses an inquiry-based approach, a solution-based application, and works toward an arts-based project or presentation of a solution.

 I had never before (prior to last Friday, anyway) seen anyone walking on North Avenue leave their path to come check out the dumpster fence.  The fence, of course, works to hide the problem. This mosaic and these students are hoping to draw you in and make you think about it instead.  So it was awesome when the screws were not even all in, and over came a person waiting for the bus, wanting to hear more about it. 

Art Cup and diagram

 Now, that is not all that happened in Project Explore this Spring.  I promise to tell you more soon. The picture above is a window into the grade 4 group, who learned about electrical circuits through lots and lots of experimenting. And only a few things went up in smoke.  But it's all about the process folks. More to come on this group soon.

Here comes the artwork! RES

Sharing work at the 2014 Spring Art and Music Night

Artwork from all grades will come home this week and next.  

Kindergarteners will be taking home their art books, an annual tradition that amasses all 2D work into a lovely book with project descriptions.  Artists in grades 1-4 will bring home portfolios with all of the 2D work they have created this year. 3D artwork typically goes home on Art and Music Night, but if your family could not attend, sculptures and pottery for those students will go home this week as well.

 

Wayne Thiebaud-inspired dessert collage, grade 3

      Please take a few minutes with your artist and ask them about the work they have made this year in art. Unsure what to ask? You can never go wrong by saying to a child Tell me about your picture.
Also try:
How did you make this?
Which part do you like best, and why?
What materials did you use?
What part challenged you? 

Still-lifes with apples, grade 3.  Grade 3?! Whoa.

Enjoy all the beauty headed your way!