SALISBURY — In September, Sacred Heart School officially kicked off its first “Makerspace Challenge.” A makerspace is a common place where students share interests, ideas, equipment, and knowledge to create, invent, learn and explore. All grades in kindergarten through the eighth grade competed in the challenge, for which the creative word was “cardboard.”
The broad challenge topic enabled Sacred Heart students to really explore their imaginations, and their projects included wild and domestic animals by kindergartners to Viking ships from eighth-graders. Fifth-grade students created “landforms and major waters,” and third-graders made “virtue webs,” just to name a few.
“I have selected our third-graders to highlight how our school takes standard curricula and allows them to explode in our students’ minds. It really is just mind-blowing,” said Makerspace Director Erin Brinkley. “During the past month, our third-graders have been reading ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and have studied different types of spiders and their webs.
They carefully researched spiders, invented devices that simulate how spiders climb (string and spider pictures), planned a design and finally created their own individual webs. Next, these young third-graders moved their ideas to our ‘Cranium Cove Makerspace,’ where the building phase began.
Using a variety of supplies including cardboard, string, paint, glue, tape and perseverance, these students created their webs. As a final touch, each web included a virtue or positive character trait at the center, as inspired by ‘Charlotte’s Web.’ What makes the webs outstanding is that the word at the center of a student’s web did not describe themselves, but a classmate that was selected secretly.”
Sacred Heart cannot be more excited about the creative student learning happening in their Makerspace.
“I am just over the moon about it. Our next generation has to be innovative and creative,” said Principal Tyler Kulp. “We have such a big responsibility as educators to teach the standard curricula, but not just as our students sit at their desks. They have to be able to apply these curricula in the world they live in.”
— Robin Fisher, Special to the Catholic News Herald
