ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) — An Albemarle County teacher is going beyond textbook notes to help her third-grade class understand a lesson on simple machines.
Meriwether Lewis Elementary School teacher Anne Straume brought together elementary, middle and high school students for a collaborative hands-on project.
She got the idea from a tweet while researching ways to help her students understand how the machines work.
“I saw a tweet from Europe that incorporated simple machines. Different age levels of children were working on it. So I was like, this is something we can bring to Albemarle County schools,” Straume said.
Straume took to Twitter, using 140 characters to reach out to middle and high schools in the district.
Her tweet caught the eye of Beth Costa, principal at Henley Middle School.
“I was looking through Twitter. It had been a little while since I had seen it,” said Costa. “I saw it again and just reached out, ‘hey had anyone responded to your request for a middle and high school to collaborate around the third-grade simple machine project?'”
“She immediately responded, saying no I haven’t found anybody. So said I think we can do this,” she added.
The last piece of the puzzle, Monticello High School, putt the project into motion.
“Before we knew it, kids were meeting, people were meeting to bring an elementary, middle and high school together,” Costa said.
Elementary school students had the task of sketching up a dream machine. Middle school students turned those drawings into computer models, and high school students were in charge of building the 3-D model.
One of those designs, the “Dog Bot,” was created by third-grader Anisten Luzaich. Her dream machine is a dog feeder for her chihuahua who is rather rowdy during feed time.
Students and teachers say the final projects exceeded their expectations.
“This was a real-life application and we couldn’t ask for anything more,” Costa said.
And it allowed students at each level to take what they learned in a textbook and apply the knowledge.
“You can read, you can look at, but when you really get an opportunity to do, that’s the deeper learning that we want for kids,” Costa said.
Educators hope other teachers in the county reach across the district to create more opportunities for students on various grade levels to collaborate.
