Event Information
ISTELive Content* Presentation begins with live music (played by yours truly) as participants enter the room.
* Opening design activity - creating and playing musical instruments with simple, inexpensive supplies such as rubber bands, string, glue, straws, and craft sticks [10 minutes]
* Discussion of makerspace uses and approaches using some easy grouping strategies such as We Agree groups (a strategy that requires participants to choose a section of the room based on an initial question, ensuring that everyone who chooses that section has something they agree upon) and Sole Mates (a paired grouping strategy). All of the grouping strategies here require movement and choice. [10 minutes]
* Debrief, whole group, the ideas around makerspaces that were expressed [5 minutes]
* Scrap Town - this is a participant-created cardboard city. We will start by getting ideas for the setting and creating a Flippity randomizer (this is just a fancy Google Sheet) to randomly select the aspects of our city based on participant suggestions [5 minutes]
* Build Scrap Town. Participants will each build one of the buildings in our cardboard town. [25 minutes]
* Give some example activities using Scrap Town in the ELA and Social Studies classrooms, then have participants in small groups create additional ideas. [2 minutes]
* If time permits, pass out index cards and actually do one of the writing activities suggested [only if building Scrap Town took less than 25 minutes]
* Debrief the activities, the movement, the grouping strategies, makerspace resources and approaches [3 minutes]
Much of the hands-on and movement-based emphasis in my session is based around the work of Janet Kise, particularly her book Doable Differentiation.
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