DIY Valentines
T4T paid our respects to Saint Valentine by hosting a card-making workshop on February 14th. Attendees started with our heart-shaped box tops and added embellishments to perfect their creations. The many thousands of beads, flowers, and other supplies we received from the liquidation of Berger Beads Co. made this occasion a rousing success!
Mardi Gras for Autism
T4T joined the Fullerton Cares foundation on a blazing Saturday morning to entertain children across the autism spectrum and their families. Our Ultimate Recycling Machine tent was so crowded at one point that we had to institute a waiting line. On the plus side, we didn’t have time to tear everything down between groups, so one family would sometimes start from the last one’s creation and improve upon it, making for some very sturdy and sophisticated contraptions.
Chadwick School
The Chadwick kindergarteners showed up at our warehouse for a day of eco-vehicle construction. Despite the large number of adult chaperones, it was all hands on deck to keep up with all the hot-gluing, sawing, and other after-market modifications to the hot rods these kids came up with. It’s tempting for us to open up a body shop using free child labor, but we think we’ll stick with our original mission statement for now.
Sun Valley Middle School
T4T was a proud participant in Engineering Week at Sun Valley’s STEM magnet school. Our director of programming ran a professional development session the week prior to give participating teachers the low-down on catapults and allow them to try constructing them from our materials. On the day of the event, we brought some 20 different materials fit for catapult construction, split the classes into 3-person teams, gave them a history lesson on catapults, and stipulated only that their machine launch a “beadbag”. Some students decided that all is fair in love and engineering, and deviated from the catapult design to build slingshots capable of powering the projectile halfway across the gym. Others delved into the more technical aspects of the catapult, building beautiful structures complete with wheels, buckets, and crossbars. The day culminated in a school-wide catapulting finals in the auditorium.
Options Pre-K PD
We were approached by Options Head Start earlier this winter with the challenge of designing a professional development workshop for 60+ pre-k educators. They wanted to expose their educators to the inspirational power of teaching with our open-ended materials, and they wanted to focus on teaching to literacy concepts. Our program director, Mindy, was up for the challenge and the educators had a great time designing alphabet-building, story-telling, and dexterity-strengthening activities out of our ‘trash’.
Orville Wright Middle School
T4T is in the midst of a program where we build makerspaces (“STEAM labs”) in classrooms using our materials, redesigning the space from top to bottom. Our STEAM lab architect made the trip to Orville Wright STEM magnet school, where the lab is now complete, to educate the educators on the use of our materials in project-based learning. Teachers were excited by the crisp new paint job and eager to start using the dry-erase painted walls, hand and power tools, and of course the many bins of T4T material.
Washington STEM Magnet
We make the trek up to Pasadena about once per month in order facilitate some hands-on learning opportunities with the students of Washington Elementary STEM Magnet School. Each time Mindy goes up there, she works with a different grade level and makes sure each student gets some valuable experience using the engineering design process to make connections to their curriculum. This time, the second grade was learning about pollination and so T4T’s tools and materials were used to design and build pollinator pairs (bats and cactus, for example). It’s always exciting for us to see the creative ways in which students use and manipulate the materials, and this time was no exception!
