Hands on Stories

Listen, look, and build. We offer a whole library of projects to help our students get in touch with famous stories.

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Measure Mobile

Sand, assemble and decorate the wheels, axles, chassis and driver of a wooden downhill racer. Then experiment. Measure the distance it travels from the end of its track. Change the pitch of the track and measure again. Change the weight of the car and measure again. An intro to numbers as the voice of science.

Tracks and measuring tools provided for each class. Special thanks: Anderson Tool, Lynn Ladder.

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House of Straw, Sticks or Bricks

Construct a basic shelter. Choose walls and roof. Consider what materials are available where. Build a family. Consider the problems your walls will protect them from: rain, snow, heat, fire, winds, floods, mice, bugs or wolves.

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Block Heads

We build to discover ourselves. Common arms, legs, heads and feet can be shaped, assembled and decorated to create the infinite variety that we are. Blockheads can tell stories, reenact history, represent heroes, display the costumes of distant lands or unleash imagination. A universal tool for learning.

We welcome your ideas for a BlockHead progam: a fable, a hero, a robot, a leader.

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Xylophone

Use eyes and hands to count and sort the wooden bars to build this six note percussion instrument. Build manual dexterity and order memory to string it together with spacers between each bar. Number each bar from 1 to 6, use letters, or use color to code the bars. Then learn to play familiar tunes with the music book that matches the numbering system.

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Bugs and a Bug House

What's the best way to understand a bug? Look at it carefully.

First build your own bug collection house.Then consider the parts of a bug. Six legs, eyes, abdomen, antennae, wings (or not), spiracles, color to hide (or not). Study models and pictures and construct your own bug to understand the names and purposes of the parts.

Then, with your magnifying glass, study your gently caught bugs before you release them. See how your bug stacks up to the real thing.

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Life Stages - Butterfly

Each living thing goes through stages of development. Construct a small theater with scenes that change to present the growth cycle of plants or animals. We offer materials to study typically pumpkins or butterflies. With a design flexible enough for teachers and students to go back to their classes and present another life cycle on the reverse side of each stage block.

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Weather Man

It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows…to paraphrase a favorite songwriter, but it does take some learning and some practice to understand the 4 cardinal directions, N, E, S,W and how the direction of the wind affects our weather.

Weather affects everything we do. Build a weather man with a wind vane at his back. When the wind turns him on his spinning base, look at the compass you've embedded and know which direction the wind is coming from. Learn to look at clouds and cloud patterns. What do they mean?

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