Morning work received an overhaul this year. After reading The Power of Play by Elkind, giving students time to collaborate, work, and PLAY together instead of assigning worksheets made so much sense! Students choose one STEAM related tub per table and cannot pick the same tub again until they have cycled through the others. Each tub contains materials for less than the number of students at the table. This encourages them to work together to create, using language that helps build cooperative students who engage face to face.
Students wake up their brains with a Morning Tub each day. These tubs have a variety of supplies in them: connecting cubes, foam blocks, Legos, and geoboards to name a few. This Ðǿմ«Ã½ project will allow the students to have additional brain building materials to use that cover the STEAM components: PlayMags magnetic building tiles, SnapCircuits electronic sets, and Keva planks which can be maneuvered into different constructions.
The students love to sketch their creations to improve them for the next round of tubs. We currently utilize a broken manual sharpener as a few hand-held ones that belong to students. The X-ACTO sharpeners will give students more time to sketch.
In addition to STEAM materials, we use books related to content areas daily. We enjoy enriching each area we learn about with quality books. Our classroom has little room to display these texts, making it difficult for the students to gain access to them. The Childcraft Book Display will prominently showcase texts related to our STEAM tubs as well as our current units of study. If you peek into our classroom, you would see our first round of books is related to soils, plants, composting, family, place value, growth mindset, engineering, and books written in letter format.
About my class
Morning work received an overhaul this year. After reading The Power of Play by Elkind, giving students time to collaborate, work, and PLAY together instead of assigning worksheets made so much sense! Students choose one STEAM related tub per table and cannot pick the same tub again until they have cycled through the others. Each tub contains materials for less than the number of students at the table. This encourages them to work together to create, using language that helps build cooperative students who engage face to face.
Students wake up their brains with a Morning Tub each day. These tubs have a variety of supplies in them: connecting cubes, foam blocks, Legos, and geoboards to name a few. This Ðǿմ«Ã½ project will allow the students to have additional brain building materials to use that cover the STEAM components: PlayMags magnetic building tiles, SnapCircuits electronic sets, and Keva planks which can be maneuvered into different constructions.
The students love to sketch their creations to improve them for the next round of tubs. We currently utilize a broken manual sharpener as a few hand-held ones that belong to students. The X-ACTO sharpeners will give students more time to sketch.
In addition to STEAM materials, we use books related to content areas daily. We enjoy enriching each area we learn about with quality books. Our classroom has little room to display these texts, making it difficult for the students to gain access to them. The Childcraft Book Display will prominently showcase texts related to our STEAM tubs as well as our current units of study. If you peek into our classroom, you would see our first round of books is related to soils, plants, composting, family, place value, growth mindset, engineering, and books written in letter format.
Read more