Learning Through Play

Do you remember as a child how you would play with your dolls or with your army set? You used your imagination in creating real life scenarios. The concept of using play to learn is key for children to enrich their experiences and make connections with real life. Play is hands on. It requires curiosity and creativity. It is a perfect way to introduce authentic learning to your students.

Often children's museums have miniature sets. You'll find grocery stores, construction sets, play kitchen. Kids love to pretend using real life objects!

You can enrich your students' play in the classroom by using these concepts and integrating your curriculum.

For example, you can use cooking in your classroom to explore measurement, temperature, multiplying (halving, doubling or tripling a recipe!), fractions, portion size, reading a recipe, collaboration, following directions all while enjoying the experience. You don't need a worksheet to explore these concepts!

Taking a step farther, once you have the basic skills involved, students can create their own recipes and alter or tweak the recipe to their taste! This encourages creativity within the boundaries of skills they are learning.

One of our favorite ways to include play in the classroom is by setting up a miniature restaurant. We build a Hamburger Shack and stock it with pretend food items. Then students order from the workers and the workers must fill the order and calculate the cost of the order correctly.

Students hone their skills on charting, adding, using a calculator, making change, and customer service. We have a download available for you to make it easy to give the Hamburger Shack a try in your own classroom!

Quotes to Inspire Your Students

If you ask any of my students that I have had over the past 40 years about what it was like to be in my classroom, there are always some common themes...

• Where The Red Fern Grows. 
• Mr. Hoefs was CRAZY. 
• And you'll almost always have someone mention a quote that has stuck with them through the years that I had hanging on the wall and drilled into their minds.

For many, many years, I had written the quotes and sayings on white tag board sheets with black permanent markers. Then I got fancy and had my students help me create some more colorful signs to hang in our Maker Space.

Jolene has started taking some of these favorite sayings and quotes of mine and turning them into beautiful and classroom-worthy posters. We've come a long way, baby (don't worry, that's not actually one of the posters!). Watch our store as she adds some of my favorite "-isms" and words of wisdom in ways I never expected to see these quotes in print - and you can print them yourself! 

I can't believe I didn't ask her earlier to help me with these...what a TRANSFORMATION!

Plus she's created them so that you can send them to a print shop or print them on your own. Check them out here! 

Hydroponics Strike Again!

I'm back in the classroom {greenhouse}!

I've finally graduate middle school...and in my retirement time am volunteering at our local high school ag department. I'm working with the agriculture teacher to start up aquaponics and hydroponics systems in the high school greenhouse.

I have ten students who have volunteered their free periods to work with me on getting these systems up and running.

Here Tyler is preparing the growing bed for the nutrient solution from the tilapia fish.

Our first steps were to obtain industrial bulk containers and cut the tops off to form the bottom tank and the top growing area. We had two of these tanks donated from Honey Acres in Ashippun, Wisconsin. Both will be used for aquaponics where we will grow about 100 tilapia over the next nine months.

I'll have more updates coming! In the meantime, if you want to try hydroponics on a small scale, check out these directions for a simple Windowsill Hydroponics system!

All you need is love...

Since my retirement last summer, I've picked up small teaching job and am volunteering at our local high school ag department. This week I met with five students and we have two IBC containers that we're getting aquaponics started in for the semester. If my experience is anything like in the past with aquaponics, that number of interested students will grow quickly!

However, the latest craze we have been exploring are using SMD LEDs to create holiday cards. We created a few for Christmas...but with Valentine's Day on the horizon we wanted to do something a little more impressive {if you're going to give your Valentine something, it's worth the effort to look good, right?!}. Check it out! Our technology experience is growing, too.

We even made a GIF.

For real.

We're getting pretty savvy around here...

via GIPHY

To make this card yourself, you can get our step-by-step directions by clicking here, or I can give you a rough breakdown. Basically you need three pieces of paper or cardstock, some SMD LEDs, (we used four in our example), copper tape, a coin battery, and some creativity!

Decorate your paper in any card style you'd like. On one piece, you'll need to decorate the "outside" to make a card, on the other, you'll decorate the "inside" and leave the back side blank. These will be fitted together at the end.

Run your tape to create a parallel circuit. Place your LEDs and battery in place, testing your LEDs as you go along. Take your third piece of paper, cut to fit over the copper wiring. Punch holes on that third piece of paper so that you can see the LEDs. We also cut a heart out of the middle so the lights really shine through! Tape the inside message to the outside message, fold, and send to your love. Full step-by-step directions can be found here.

Windowsill Gardening

Red white and blue for Independence Day!

What a whirlwind. I can't believe that after 39 years I have officially retired from teaching! But don't think that retirement is going to slow me down...In fact I have a host of hands on learning and teaching opportunities already scheduled! The week after school, I taught a three day course to teachers on developing Makers Labs in their schools. We made hands on projects. We visited two Makers Labs in our area. We had fun while learning.

Not sure what a Maker Space or Makers Lab is? Check out our free download that walks you through the philosophy of it.

After this course, these teachers plan to initiate Makers Labs and Maker Spaces in their school buildings.

I also participated in a Fourth of July Celebration for 60 students at a local school to learn about Thomas Jefferson and the tinkering and inventing that he did. Then we made hydroponic planters from deli containers. The kids went crazy over them! I painted theirs red white and blue to fit the theme.

Check out how quickly this lettuce is growing! These photos were taken just one week apart!

Freaky Flipping Friday!

Here I am on Freaky Flipping Friday! where we flipped the class and students do a science presentation! These girls enlightened us about the chemistry of an egg white facial (with a bit of yolk!). The egg was on my face and the yolk was on me!

Some of the other presentation topics included Radiation from Hiroshima and how Leukemia was more frequent after the bomb; and a demonstration how to disassemble an iPhone and replace a cracked screen. My eighth grade students are phenomenal this year. They just soak up knowledge and rise to the challenge that they are given. They are curious and creative kids.

Winter Wonderland

Snow before Thanksgiving!

About two inches of snow fell this weekend. I'm not a huge fan of winter. I'm really not a huge fan of snow. But...I'm trying to remain positive about the impending winter {Impending? Seriously, winter is here. It's 15 degrees right now with a "real feel" of NEGATIVE 2. Stay positive. Stay positive.}.

I don't do well in winter. The cold. The darkness. The snow. I'm popping some vitamin D as we speak.

To make the most of this weather, I'm bundled up inside our cozy house with about six layers of clothes {did I really grow up here? It's times like these that I'm positive I'm not a native Wisconsinite!}. Since I can barely move because of the layers, and I'm most definitely not venturing outside, I am focusing on something fun inside.I drew a set of 37 Winter Wonderland Snowflake clip art for personal and commercial use! Check it out HERE! I had so much fun with my new touchscreen notebook. As a lefty, I've always struggled with illustrating using my mouse. The touchscreen has opened a whole new world for me! It's really exciting to design naturally. I'm amazed at how much more quickly my work goes!

Winter Wonderland Snowflakes

Off to warm up with a hot cup of tea.

~Jolene