Jennifer Call
4th Grade
Meet the Maker: Jennifer Call
My name is Jennifer Call and I am a 4th grade teacher at Elmwood Elementary. Maker culture is important because it truly engages students in the problem solving process. Posing a hypothetical problem to students and then asking them to find a solution for it is what we have historically done. That is only surface level. Taking the students through the entire design process allows them to better comprehend the problem, take more ownership in the process and their solution, and gives them the opportunity to see the importance of revising, re-evaluating, and changing their thinking - something that I have found difficult for elementary students to do.
Provocation: Design, build, and test a product that helps a living thing impacted by weather, climate, or pollution in their environment.
Maker Plan: Reading and Science
What we are making, Why we are Making, Who we are Making for:
We are making products that help living things that are negatively affected by the weather, climate, or pollution in their environment. We are making these products because students are empathetic to living things and want to help them survive.
Maker Skill Builders & Highlights
Disruptus
This is a great Skill Builder to do first! It is a great introduction to the Design Thinking Process.
RSD5Ready, Set, Design
Click here to view the rest of the videos from our Ready, Set, Design Skill Builder! Their challenge in this Skill Builder? Design a product that would help to keep babies warm in cold weather.
Student Product Samples
Take a look at the pictures below! After the students completed their Maker's Projects we had their families come in so they could discuss their products and the Maker Process. The pictures show some of the students' prototypes and presentations of their Maker Projects.
This prototype is called the Desert Rover 2.0. The students learned that cacti suffer from soil pollution due to underground propane tanks rusting, breaking open, and releasing gas into the soil. They created this self-propelled robot that filtered the soil for the cacti.
These students wanted to help save the Eurasian Otters. They learned that Eurasian Otters suffer from habitat loss due to their water being taken by humans. They created this water filtration system that filtered flood water. The idea is that the humans would use this filtered water for themselves.
Here you are looking at the EMC20 and the Fen HR. These students learned that Bengal Tigers die due to droughts because they don't have enough water. This product lets out EMC20 which cancels out carbon dioxide. This will help because the carbon dioxide creates Greenhouse Gases and global warming.
These boys are on a mission to save dolphins from pollution, specifically objects like plastic left in the ocean. Their product sucks the pollution up into a chamber. Once the chamber fills up all of the pollution goes back to land in a tunnel system.
Additional Teacher Resources & Reproducibles:
Additional Teacher Resources & Reproducibles: Please remember to make a copy of the Google Docs, Slides, etc.
In order to help the students break down and better understand the Making Process we created eight different handouts broken into phases to use with the students. (To help differentiate between the different phases, we printed each phase on a different color paper.) This worked very well with our students. You can use these documents to help guide your students through the Making Process. Just make a copy of each and change the text to match your provocation.
Must know tips for Teachers:
- Start with skill builders first instead of just jumping into a Maker Project right away.
- Focus on the process of this, not necessarily the product. This is where the true learning is done!
- Know that the prototype might not be exactly what the students want it to be due to material constraints, and that is okay! (Something I had hard time grasping.)
- The ending doesn't actually need to be a product, it could be a rally, a organization, etc.