An a-MAZE-ing STEM activity! 

Here’s my recipe for an amazing Thursday morning:

Ingredients:  Bags of things from the Scrap Box, 5 marbles, a bunch of fourth graders, simple rules to follow (1.  Create a 3D maze.  2.  Your marble needs to go UNDER something in your maze.  3.  Your marble needs to go OVER something in your maze.  Your maze should be able to be held while your marble goes through it.), and a large quantity of cooperation, innovation, and patience.

 We started by drawing our own ideas before meeting with our teammates.  Kids had 10 minutes of sketching time.  They then met with their team members and discussed ideas they all had one each other.  They picked a base for their maze and a bin full of supplies.  They could only use the things in the tubs they received. They had 45 minutes to create their mazes.  Wow.  What a wonderful activity.  They worked really well with one another and came up with FAB designs! We talked about what we learned by doing our other STEM activities and what we could take away from those experiences to make this one even better.  Everyone cooperated, shared ideas, encouraged one another, and created wonderful maze designs.  They had a chance to play with them after lunch and it was great hearing them compliment one another!  Here are some things we discussed after building our mazes:

What worked and what didn’t’ work?

How did you decide what you were going to do?

What was the easiest part about creating your maze? 

What was the hardest part? 

What did you do if you disagreed with someone?

When we finished our discussion, everyone wrote a reflection piece about the activity.  This went home with them on Thursday!  It includes an illustration of the completed maze along with their thoughts about the entire process.

We will share our maze designs with our first grade buddies in Miss Wagner’s class when we get back from break.  Yay!

Bravo!