Inventive Curriculum
If you saw teams of upper elementary students stacking marshmallows and chocolate pieces between graham crackers, you might think they’re engaged in a cooking project. Would it surprise you to learn they were actually completing a hands-on science experiment?
Students placed their culinary creations inside a cardboard box and positioned their aluminum foil on top. Then they hypothesized about how long it would take for the sun to turn their science projects into tasty smores! As part of a project that included learning about solar energy, students laid their creations out in the sun and began timing their experiment.
These students were in the middle of a three-month intensive unit on alternative energy. Under the guidance of teachers Jon Pfeifer and Brian Binkowski, they worked together to design model houses and create online blueprints using Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. Over the next several weeks, small teams of students built model homes based on their designs, while learning the basics of energy production and consumption, as well as the use of alternative sources of energy. Each week, the teams learned new concepts and found ways to incorporate them into their models, transferring their knowledge to real life situations.
They added solar panels to their roofs and learned about simple circuitry to wire their homes for lighting. At the end of the project, they had working models of their own green houses of the future!
