Global Maker Day

Today was a great day, I facilitated a full day of Making with Pukemiro School and visitors from Taupiri School.  What a great opportunity to work with students and teachers to encouraged a bit of making, creating and idea generating.  Everyone had a great day with quite a bit of pleading at the end of the day for some of the challenges to make an appearance again soon.

Pukemiro's Principal Wendy Sheridan-Smith tweeted during the day - I managed to make a few tweets too but was pretty busy being an idea coach for the Making Music and Crazy Maze challenges.

The Day started with introducing the students to their teams, creating a bit of buzz by renaming their teachers to be idea coaches for the day and then encouraging ideas by sharing What do you do with an Idea? By Kobi Yamada.  I really like this story as it talks about nurturing ideas and being brave about sharing them.  It's also inspiring, thinking about how ideas can grow and change the world.  I think it's important for students to realise that their ideas matter and to get real practice in working with a team and accepting, testing and challenging their own and their team mates ideas.

The students decided as a team where they would go first with not a lot of information about what activities were where.  Due to space constraints we had to be a bit careful about how many we could have in each space but apart from that students were allowed to move on once they'd completed a challenge as a team as long as there was space for them.

During the day the conversations amongst teams were fantastic, music to an educators ears.  It's heart warming to see students helping students, testing and challenging respectfully and really getting so engaged in something that they don't want to stop when lunchtime comes around.  It's also great to see a different side to some students, to give them an opportunity to really shine when they come up with an idea that gets the team through to the next stage of the challenge.

I find this sort of situation a great time to take a step back and really look and listen to students to find out a lot more about where they're at.  It's fairly easy to get a really good picture of what a student can cope with and what they might need more coaching on anything from how they're working in a team, motor skills, ability to work under pressure, what they do when things get hard, strategies for dealing with not knowing or feeling unsure.   There are plenty of other skills to look at too depending on what challenges you've set.

I think this will be great to repeat again soon. I'm Looking forward to seeing where the students take the ideas they started today over the next few weeks.



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