Week 3

Puzzles

The object that I created to use in my classroom to support students is puzzles. The essential question that my 1st grade students are focusing on is "Why do people get involved in their communities?"

I created puzzles that were used to support students in making connections between community helpers and people they would recognize in their communities. A learning objective for this lesson would be: Students will identify and describe community helpers and explain how their jobs help the community by working together to build and solve puzzles that represent different helpers and their roles.

In digital fabrication I am far more comfortable using digital fabrication for kids. I feel that this is easier to do in primary grades because some of the instruments are harder to use and supervise with students aged 5-7.

Mistakes are proof you are learning!

Here is the first puzzle I made on my own. I thought I had the lines in the correct area but as you can see my lines did not go through to the outside of my design.

Second time is the charm

After double/ triple checking that my borders were correct the second round I sent the puzzles to the laser cutter to be cut.

This puzzle helped students connect that community helpers can also be military personnel.

The more obvious community helpers that students could connect background knowledge to was a nurse or doctor.

The second connection to previous background knowledge was connecting the community helpers to the firefighters that were at our school last year when one of our classrooms caught fire and our firefighters were there to helpl.

A community helper that is lesser known are the mail carriers. It was fun to help make this connection for the students because a lot of them have items that are delivered to their houses and they did not consider them when coming up with community helpers.

Here are my students building the puzzles and making connections to community helpers.

This was also a great way to get students to work and collaborate together as a team.

Some groups struggled to put the puzzles together and needed assistance putting them together.

Other groups were able to put several of the puzzles together and wished that there were more.

A different way that I can integrate the laser cutter into future lessons is by cutting out different shapes for the students to visualize and have a hands on experience with. A learning objective for that lesson would be: Students will learn the the differences in 2D shapes and identify them and their atributes.
When I am creating a lesson some of the things that I consider are: will this lesson teach the students what they need to learn, will it hold their attention, what are different ways that I can meet the learning preferences of all my students throughout the lesson.
1. Some of the critical aspects that I keep in mind are what are the end goals for this lesson? With this in mind I am able to build the lesson backwards and ensure that the activity is directly measuring the objective.
2. One of the things that I have to consider when I am creating a lesson using digital fabrication is what background knowledge do my students have on this. This is one of the more challenging things in my opinion because most students at my school have had zero interaction with any sort of fabrication tools and I don't necessarily know where to start with them.
In past activities I have not considered socio-emotional learning when preparing the activity. I think that after this lecture I will keep in mind the SEL of my students because if they are more prepared and feel safe then they will likely participate more in my lessons that I have planned. I also think that integrating SEL in the start of these hands on lessons would allow the students to be more present and willing to try new things because they can see that some of their peers are in the same boat as them and do not have experience in the fabrication tools we will be using.

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