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Parent/professors as learners

The group of 2-10 year olds who visited the Lesley Makerspace this past Friday had a big task at hand: to teach their parents, professors in the Lesley Language and Literacy Division, how to create their own eBook.  Through this special gathering, we witnessed the unique flow of teaching and learning between child and parent.

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K-Lo team competes at BPS Robotics Olympics

Three third and fourth grade students from the Kennedy-Longfellow School spent a Saturday in early June participating in the Boston Public Schools (BPS) Robotics Olympics. Not only were they amongst the youngest students there, they were also honored to be the only team representing the Cambridge Public Schools.

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K-Lo Robotics Playground

On May 21st, over  150 Cambridge Public Schools (CPS) families and students converged in the Kennedy-Longfellow School (K-Lo) dining hall  for an evening of creative robotics, prizes, and pizza. K-Lo hosted the first ever CPSD “Robotics Playground” with the idea of sharing out classroom robotics and engineering curricula. K-Lo was in good company — with teacher and student teams from the high school, Amigos, Fletcher Maynard, King Open, Tobin, 8 middle school volunteers from Putnam Ave, and Ingrid Gustafson, who represents all of the middle schools.

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We had a host of special guests, including Superintendent Young and Assistant Superintend MaryAnn MacDonald, two school committee representatives, Fred Fantini and Patty Nolan, Terry Gist, President of the Cambridge Education Association, a representative from the City Councilor Nadeem Mazen’s office, reps from the Best Practices group in the STEAM initiative being coordinated through City Hall, a representative from the Cambridge Expanded Learning STEAM Network, the director of the Elementary Education program at Lesley University, and 4 parent representatives from the KLO Site Council.

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A night of STEAM in North Cambridge

The Cambridge Expanded Learning (EL) STEAM Network hosted an evening full of rockets, robots and race cars; providing an open space for students of all ages to engage in maker-minded activities. Families and students gathered at the Peabody School on Wednesday, June 17th to enjoy hands-on activity tables including: making their own “edible” race car, an interactive splatter paint pendulum, creating music with the MaKey MaKey, and pressure powered rockets.

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Stop Motion Monster Mashing

Fi9780062125941rst grade students explored color mixing in art class by creating their own stop motion animation videos. The stop motion center was just one of six centers set up by K-Lo art teacher Amanda Kilton. The other centers included an overhead projector color transparencies, stamp mixing, tissue paper collage, painting and a color-based book browsing table with titles like “Monsters Love Colors.”

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Kinetic Art & Simple Machines

The Kinetic Sculpture/Simple Machines has been a project-based collaboration between the 5th grade classroom teachers, the art teacher, the Library/Media Specialist and the technology teacher. The project began by the classroom teacher introducing the concept of simple machines during homeroom science blocks. Students documented and explained every day simple machines found in the kitchen: a can opener, knife, pizza cutter, etc. Teachers also set up an engineer “gallery walk” where students walked around the school makerspace and read about over 20 types of engineers. They were then tasked with finding two types of engineering they were interested in and explaining their interest.

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New teacher community gathers to make

On May 30th, 14 members of the Lesley New Teacher Community (NTC) gathered in the new Lesley Makerspace to experience hands-on STEAM activities. The group included new teachers from a range of grades and disciplines who were eager to discover these new tools for themselves.

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Lesley makerspace launch ignites hearts & minds

The buzz was palpable as Lesley faculty, staff, community members and friends wove their way through the newly launched makerspace. Housed on the second floor of University Hall at Lesley, the makerspace features a wide variety of teaching and learning tools rooted in the maker mentality.
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