Periodic Table Project

During the Table Arc, the students of the Azure Band (ages 7 & 8) explored the elements on the periodic table after their collaborator Mary Catherine uncovered an excited interest amongst her students in this topic. They turned what they learned into a design project that incorporated math and art and led them to sell T-shirts they designed at the annual school Maker Marketplace. The following is an account of their process.

Step 1: Exploration of the Periodic Table 

At the beginning of Table arc, the students were brainstorming questions, examples, and connections when one of the students asked, “Wait, can we include the Periodic Table?” Due to student excitement we spent the arc exploring what elements are, the properties of certain elements, and following a scientific process when doing experiments. This spiraled throughout the arc, allowing us to apply what we learned in one experiment to a subsequent experiment. I also introduced atomic structure and the idea of the periodic table as an organized source of information about elements. 

Step 2: Exploring the Craft of Printmaking

To launch into our T-shirt project, we explored the craft of printmaking. We started by making designs that were a symbol of ourselves to start thinking both about what makes a good symbol and a good print. This helped us understand the possibilities and limitations of printing. The students were constrained by being able to use just one ink color and the background to show the image. We visited artist Jake at the Wishing Well on Clement Street to learn about the basics of screenprinting and printing presses. 

Step 3: Making a Representational Print Design

After these initial steps, we were ready to make a design about our elements from the periodic table. First, we had to become experts by reading across different texts about our elements to learn how they are used, where they are found, and their properties. Next, students sketched a symbol of their element to put on a shirt that reflected what they had learned in their reading. Then we made block prints and presented the designs at a feedback roundtable led by resident screenprinting expert Ally. 

Step 4: Making the Screens
Using that feedback, students make a second sketch and transferred the sketch onto screens. We accidentally made a mistake by using a watery filler on the screens and had to iterate designs once more, giving us all an opportunity to further improve our designs. Then we printed the designs on t-shirts.

Step 5: Learning how to Work with Money
While getting ready for the t-shirt shop at Maker Marketplace, students needed to develop strong recall, flexibility, and comfort working with money. To do this, we played games that practiced building up to a dollar with dice rolls and subtracting back to $0.00. We also made mock stores and practiced adding up sales and making change.  

Step 6: Being Shopkeepers
Students were also challenged by this project to brainstorm what makes a good shop. This led us to making a display, signs, and a cash box to be ready for the big day during the holiday season in December. Maker Marketplace was a great opportunity for students to practice explaining their project, making sales, and tending the shop (they even honed their folding skills!).

Step 7: Reflection
As with all projects, the students finished by reflecting on the process, writing documentation of what they did, and presenting their work at student-led conferences. We reflected on our sales, figured out what our profit had been, and voted on how to use that profit as a band. Students voted to use the funds for their projects to get a class pet. They also voted to donate some of the money to support community groups who provide shelter for the homeless. 

The Periodic Table Project was an integrated project accompanied by additional skills practice. While moving forward with screenprinting and shop making, Mary Catherine also brought mathematics and literacy practice to her students, as detailed below.

Additional Mathematics Study

In addition to the money math for the T-Shirt Shop, the students practiced using multiplication. We started by exploring tangible examples of multiplication like items organized in equal groups, stamps, windows, and box designs. This helped students who were new to multiplication build a conceptual understanding of the operation and for students who were more familiar to start noticing deeper patterns and properties.

We explored patterns on number lines and in the hundreds chart to build more visual models of multiplication. This helped students apply patterns they had been noticing to expedite problem solving and develop more tools to solve future problems. We explored arrays and ways of drawing equal groups to further emphasize multiplication as a form of repeated addition. This helped students see the multiplication around them and the comfort with multiplication they needed to make their own multiplication table. 

Students also played many games to practice applying multiplication and seeing and using patterns strategically. This included making bingo boards, totaling equal groups from dice rolls, and filling in multiples on a hundreds chart.

Additional Reading and Writing Practice

We started the Brightworks tradition of participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) by coming up with a plan for our fiction chapter books. This meant planning our main characters’ traits, dreams, and challenges, coming up with a clear story arc, and outlining each part of our story. This also gave students space to iterate on their ideas, often realizing that their idea was too simple for an interesting chapter book and coming up with new ideas.

We used this writing project to deeply dive into literary structures to think about what makes good fiction. To do this we read This Was Our Pact as a shared read, both to help further develop reading techniques and get inspiration for our work as writers. We practiced figuring out the meaning of new words, summarizing chapters, rereading when we feel confused, making connections to clues the author has given us, and tracking how characters change over time. We continued this work by reading The Tale of Despereaux after seeing a musical adaptation. This book served as our mentor text for editing and revising as it is a powerful example of weaving multiple perspectives into a story and intentional word choice.

While working on their NaNoWriMos, we explored Chris Van Allsburg as a mentor author. His stories are full of great examples of description, comparisons, elaboration and dialogue. After identifying these techniques in his work, students tried them in their own work. They also took turns sharing their works in progress as examples of how they used these techniques in their own writing as they stretched out simple sentences, created interesting characters, and wrote mini scenes full of dialogue.

In addition to using craft moves thoughtfully, NaNoWriMo also provided students with a great opportunity to work on their writing stamina, develop strategies for planning their writing chapter by chapter, and problem solve when they felt stuck.  

Lastly students typed up their stories as a way to improve their drafts and get their work ready to share. They learned how to edit a peers work, find and fix spelling and grammar mistakes in their own writing and make real, structural changes to their stories to improve their work.