Celebrating #GLobalmakerday Today and Every Day

Making is at the core of Piedmont's culture  WE MAKE SO MUCH, IT'S HARD TO HYPERLINK IT ALL!​

Every day is #GlobalMakerDay at Piedmont! Well, maybe not EVERY day, but it IS extremely rare to walk the halls of Piedmont and not see students planning or building something across the curriculum and at all grade levels. Students are even making and creating during standardized test times, the time usually known as the least creative of the year.

Making is a given in our interdisciplinary passion projects, in Ms. Newburger's excellent Library Makerspace,  in clubs, and in encore classes like Art, Band, Drama and Orchestra, but what makes me love Piedmont so much is how common it is in our core classes as well!

Consider Mr. O'Neill this week alone, from spears to swans his students were making. Props to him and all to the Individuals and Societies teachers whose students recently built their own tools when studying the stone age. They then created marketing campaigns for the tools and sold them to classmates.

The Social Studies classroom  making tradition continues in the upper grades as students design build earthquake resistant structures and make period costumes living history exhibits, industrial revolution inventions (yet more industrial revolution),  civil rights museums, (another Civil Rights museum) etc.

Teachers model making at Piedmont. Mr. Egnot models this by transforming his classroom into a war zone of WW1 trenches and the media center yearly through his maker skills and Ms. Frilot transforms her classroom to a poetry cafe with soft lighting, colors, and seating.

In World Language and Language Arts classes, students write songs for the Harlem Renaissance, compile playists and record their own podcasts,  design and build whirligigs (both with wood, and with minecraft redstone)and recreate setting layouts and film their own movies based on their novel studies. They make culture clusters that make manifest their own poems.

In Math, students make large and small designs for the famous Scale Model Project. They also create their own board games and of course there's the yearly giant Prism-palooza! 

In Science, they design their best protective egg case then test it out by catapulting the egg using a homemade catapult.

What does this culture of making lead to? It leads to kids who think creatively and make for special occasions and for no reason at all! They spend their free time building and making everything from towers to ASMR videos.

Stay tuned for more as we celebrate active learning and creating today and every day at #PiedmontIB.  Send me your photos and videos if I don't happen by!

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