Explore at Deer Park Middle with Loni

Deer Park Middle School is located in North Charleston, South Carolina.  In this library we focused on the foundation of explore especially the tinkering and making standard.  The Loni Lewis is a part of the district cohort Tinker Tubs Year 2: Expand.  In this cohort she is able to check out maker activities for her students to use in her library.  She has also gained ideas about maker resources through this cohort to add to her library.  She has purchased some maker resources on her own, she has had some maker resources donated to her, and she has received grants for maker resources.  

Students know about these resources and love them.  While I was at Deer Park, I was able to observe students coming into the library on their lunch periods to mess around with these resources.  One student had started a Lego car, he continued to add onto his creative project.  Another student wanted to make different shapes and structures out of kinetic sand.  Another student who is a part of the library STEM club after school coded the Ozobots to drive along a particular path he drew.  Lastly I got to observe a female student make origami.  Loni pushed into a math class last week to do a geometry lesson which involved making origami boxes.  This student took to the origami quickly and wanted to come back to the library to learn more about making different origami shapes.  

The Loni was able to collaborate with a math teacher to implement making in to a lesson,  but this is a rare case.  Loni sends out focus emails to specific teachers who may want to collaborate with her using maker resources because she knows many teachers will turn a blind eye to her emails.  She has tried to get teachers on board about the WHY making is important to implement in any area of curriculum, she has been successful with a few individuals but each time she gets someone on board they transfer to another school shortly later.  The teacher turnover at Deer Park is high, each year the Loni has to start over again with a big group of new teachers to the school, overall collaborating with making resources has not been a huge success at Deer Park.  

Challenges with making within the library is present in the students' attitudes.  Students are so used to being told when and how to start an activity followed by when and how to end, they are completely lost when they have a choice to tinker and explore.  Many times Loni sees that students do not know where to begin when making materials are put in front of them, as they get started they always want to know when they should be done, what the end product should look like.  The Loni is working hard to push against this mindset to help them think individually and creatively.  The mindset of the students is not the only challenge, time and space play a part in this as well.  The Deer Park library is small and if a student was to be in the library for a full class period, that would be just under a hour.  Trying to get students to think past limiting their work to just one class period has been a struggle.  She has tried to get students to realize their work does not need to have a limit on it, it is done when they themselves think they are done.