“This makes me want to come to school!”

 In #TAFLab

TechStart School Day is off to a fantastic start at Highlands Elementary in Renton.  This week, our co-teacher Jonathan Howland sent me this story about his students:

The students at Highlands Elementary School are a bright and motivated group. Like children everywhere, they love to run and play; however, many of the students have found something they like more: TechStart!

The students in Mrs. Gollob’s class have TechStart right before recess. Each week, there seems to be a larger and larger chorus of students asking to stay in from recess to work on Lego Mindstorms cars. One student in this class, Jason, always wants to know what is coming next in TechStart – I usually indulge him and our joke has become that he will say, “I’m learning so much, I think my head might explode!”

The enthusiasm for the TechStart curriculum extends beyond building with Legos. Just today, when Miss Anderson’s class was lining up for music class, at the end of TechStart, I overheard several students reminding their peers to stand still in line: they were saying things like, “no kinetic energy in line” and “don’t let your potential energy become kinetic energy.”

In Mr. Dunn’s class, students do a fantastic job of connecting the TechStart curriculum to their own lives. Today, Yasmin was commenting that when she was baking cookies this weekend, and dropped a mixing bowl full of raw cookie dough, it didn’t break – “the bowl must not have been high enough and there wasn’t enough energy.”

The students at Highlands have a lot to be proud of.

I also heard from Miss Anderson, one of the 5th grade teachers. During her class’s TechStart hour, she says, “a student told me, ‘This makes me want to come to school!’

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