My Summer of MAKE

​As this summer wraps up and the cycle of a new year in education begins anew, I take to my blog to do a little reflection. Like many people who blog, it a challenge to stay on stop of your reflections and writing and the internet is littered with discarded blogs. Although I try to share out in other ways like my podcast “Check This Out”, plus my templates and now listicles, I want to keep at this blog as I find it the most effective tool for being reflective. 

So now as I look back at the past two months of mine, I feel content and inspired to start the school year. 

And that inspiration for me was simply “TO MAKE”

This was my summer of MAKE, my summer of disconnecting and stretching myself creatively and artistically. I found inspiration in many different places. Like so many of us out there, the things we create aren’t necessarily always a “new idea” but ones we found from others and that is definitely the case for me this summer. I found ideas in a multitude of places. For sure Pinterest was a big help but also just snapping my own photos as I bounced around from place to place in my travels. So, in this post I will share some photos of my finished projects. All of them were a stretch for me,  as I am normally more creative with a computer than a saw but I am proud of myself for learning some new skills and making something out of nothing. 

Here are five of my summer MAKES:

My first make was inspired from Andy Losik as I saw him and his daughters making a license plate bottle opener. 

My second project was what I wrote about in my previous post about my Creativity Lab

Next was the Compost bin where I followed the instructions from Wood Working for Mere Mortals. 

I've been wanting make one of these for either at school or at home and decided to do my back yard first. You can see tons of these ideas all over the web. For us, we put places that are part of our family story

Lastly, here is a coffee table made from VHS tapes (plus a little plywood and a LOT of hot glue). I made this for my lab for the students who would like to sit on the floor with cushions. 

And its this Making Mentality which will be my focus for my class.

I have decided to turn my Monday’s into MAKING MONDAYS, where I will give my students 15 or so minutes at the start of the day to just “make something”. I will have different mediums, so for example one Monday we may make with cardboard while the next could be Legos. I may at times give them a subtle direction such as “make something for our classroom” or “make a game someone else can play”. But the my biggest focus will be to just step back and allow unstructured, unplugged play and creativity. All in the hopes of getting them engaged in the class and priming the pump in their brains for creativity. 

I’ll let you know how it goes