Piece by Piece: Best Summer Vacation without WIFI Ever!

Design challenges with Plus Plus

For an entire week, my children indulged in activities that didn't rely on electricity or WIFI. It wasn't a form of punishment or an organized "family values" challenge (see Screen Free week). It was a week in the Adirondacks. When they weren't discovering new ways to jump in a lake or capture little frogs, they played card games (Crazy 8s, Go Fish, etc), Pixie Sticks, Jenga, but there was something new to me that was just so mind-blowing in its intellectual absorption and simplicity.

Nothing more mesmerizing than
watching your kids being mesmerized.

They are called Plus Plus puzzle pieces made by a company in Denmark. Each piece is small enough to sit comfortably on your fingertip and is made of flexible plastic. Since the sets do not come with directions, the blueprint is truly in the hands of builder. But they have the same allure of Lego bricks, begging to be pieced together. Try connecting two pieces. And I defy you to not attach a third, fourth, and so on.

The activity easily promotes fine motor development, hand eye coordination, pattern recognition, interpersonal skills since builders often ask for feedback, and spatial reasoning. Research has indicated that children who play puzzles are more likely to develop an interest in the STEM fields.

My kids would sit for lengthy sessions, manipulating the Plus Plus pieces into place in their best efforts to match the design they envisioned. There's nothing more mesmerizing than watching your children being mesmerized. I'm not sure if I could've stopped them if I waved a WIFI enabled iPad in front of them. Oh sure, now that we're back from the Adirondacks, they do have their WIFI devices again, but they're still building with Plus Plus keeping their fingers dexterous and persistent and their imaginations lively.

Classroom Architect

Create a new classroom floor plan
with this drag and drop online tool

     Teachers often wrangle with the issue of insufficient or inadequate use of classroom space. It's especially true today as teachers make the most of a 1:1 model or carve out space for making or taking apart those broken printers and VCRs. So for those teachers who want to put on their architect hat and create a new classroom floor plan, the 4Teachers site offers this handy online tool.
     For more ideas on what to consider when redesigning your room, this blog post from Edutopia offers a few suggestions. Happy hacking!

From Wondering to Researching to Teaching

Wondering topics ranged from
supernovas, to sustainable energy, to
Sesame Street.

     Children come to school each day with that built-in sense of wonder. Classroom teachers are challenged to find ways to sharpen their skills for finding answers to the things they wonder about. These essential research skills, whether asking targeted questions, synthesizing ideas, or educating an audience, will serve them well in school and life. Mrs. Blackley challenged her 5th grade students to wonder about anything and write a short narrative that incorporated their findings. And while their writings were fascinating reads in themselves, the impact is in the videos they produced and then published to the Internet, which will allow them to reach and teach a broader and, potentially, global audience.
     So as a class, we discussed the video medium and how the spoken words, or script, provide information, often research findings, that support the visuals. The video script is a different style of writing compared with their expository pieces. Once we had a rough script, we developed a visual storyboard using Google Slides.
     The storyboard is our pre-production plan for editing in iMovie. Students recorded their narration using Vocaroo, a web based tool, downloaded mp3, picture, and video files into iMovie, and after one or two editing lessons, were on their way. The results were impressive. But as I always tell students, the most informative and engaging videos begin with an informative and engaging script. The foundation of the video has to be a great story. Otherwise, the video becomes Grandpa's slideshow of Yellowstone Park and your audience will yawn and lean towards the door. As I often tell my students, when it comes to making videos, the easiest thing to do is make a bad one. Our goal was to make videos that engaged and informed an audience and left them begging to see it again and again. I believe we accomplished that. Check out Manami's fantastic video production as well as her storyboard. It's unfathomable that when the year began, she hardly spoke English :)