Raft River Elementary School students were tasked with designing and building prototypes for an outdoor learning area at the school during the annual Maker Day.
Grade 3 teacher Elizabeth Shook said the exercise helps the students gain a variety of skills like collaboration, small-scale construction and taking an idea from start to finish.
“The kids are using a process called “design thinking” and they’re given a real-world task,” said Shook.
“We’re actually planning on building an outdoor area and we’re letting the kids have an opportunity to dream, plan and think about what they would want in an outdoor classroom, so they feel like they have a say in things. They feel really empowered by it.”
This is third year Raft River Elementary has held a Maker Day for students and for the event teachers pose a problem, which the children then have to remedy by executing construction processes like cutting, gluing and inventing.
Last year the students practiced their engineering skills to figure a way to help salmon swim up river.
“This year, because the outdoor committee is trying to get the ball rolling on an outdoor learning area for our school, we thought this would be a good problem for our kids to solve,” said Shook.
The students spent the morning asking questions, planning and dreaming up ideas, she added, and then went to work building the prototypes.
After the projects were complete they were able to check out what fellow students came up with as well as show off their own ideas before all the finished prototypes were set up in the hallway of Raft River School for display.
Shook said following week they’d do it all over again with the intermediate students, then the person responsible for designing the outdoor learning area will pick and choose elements from all the projects to go into the lifesized version outside of the school.
“It’s a great opportunity for kids to feel empowered, to have a say in the world around them and know their opinions are valuable,” Shook said.
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