Petite Planks and the Process

Last November, I attended the AASL conference in Phoenix, Arizona. While I was there, I made a big personal purchase - planks. Technically, they are called Keva Planks. They are deceptively simple: plain rectangular pieces of wood. I bought a bag of 200 planks at that conference with my own money. It took a lot of wrangling to distribute all the planks throughout my luggage so that the increased weight wouldn't cause extra baggage fees at the airport. This week, at my school, those Keva Planks demonstrated that they were worth buying, thanks to my youngest and oldest school learners. (By the way, the website is http://www.kevaplanks.com/ and I just bought 200 more planks this weekend using school funds from a Canadian distributor.)

The Youngest Learners

As frequent readers of this blog will remember, I've been trying to go slow and incorporate more play in my program, especially my kindergarten program. Aviva Dunsiger commented on my blog post and encouraged me to use more loose parts. Her exact words were:

I’m thrilled to hear that you provided more time for play and enjoyed the results. I wonder what would happen with even more open-ended toys: some blocks, loose parts, small pieces of wood, etc. Would this change the type of play that you see, and even more of the connections to literacy and math? Curious to know if you give this a try and what you notice.

So, I brought out my Lego and my Keva planks to see what would happen. I saw each of our three kindergarten classes twice this week. I was completely blown away by the students in Ms. Chiu's JK/SK class. The level of cooperation and teamwork, especially for their age and the length of time they've known each other (only three weeks) made their accomplishments even more astounding to me. (After all, I cannot expect our littlest learners, some of whom have never been to school before, to automatically know how to share, take turns, or communicate effectively. For instance, one set of students in another kindergarten class are mostly parallel players and are struggling with socializing with their peers in large groups, so their class routine [maintained in the library for consistency] is to keep groups to four per activity.) 

This was the final result of work by a group of three Junior Kindergarten / Year One girls.

I took a ton of photos of them and tweeted a different one.

Was wowed by some JKs/Yr1s in Ms Chiu’s class at @AgnesMacphailPS who used our library play time to build a really tall tower (look @avivaloca & @jenabee_c, loose parts!) Great teamwork & math talk about height! pic.twitter.com/tyUhg6ivJA

— Diana Maliszewski (@MzMollyTL) September 26, 2018

Later, I realized that so much of the magic that happened was the way that the girls built the tower.  By posting the picture of the end product without what happened beforehand provided an incomplete account of the student-generated STEAM task. I tweaked a set of four photos with faces obscured to give a glimpse of the process. Let me elaborate a little bit more here. To keep their privacy, I'll refer to the engineers by their clothes.

The photo above was taken during the early to mid stages of the build. "Pink Dress" began the build initially by herself (with the planks standing fence-like), but was soon joined by "Pink Shirt" and "Striped Shirt", who brought planks to give to "Pink Dress" and then started to add planks themselves.

This second photo (above) shows how all three girls are kneeling together to build. They talked a lot about making it.

I love this third photo, because it shows that mathematics was part of the talk. "Striped Shirt" indicated to the others how tall she hoped the tower would become, by using her extended hand as a non-standard unit of measurement.

This fourth photo shows the growth in the height of the structure. The girls can no longer kneel to add their planks. As it grew and grew, other students (playing with Lego nearby) glanced at the tower with interest, but allowed the girls to continue to build. Their kindergarten class teacher entered the library when the tower was as tall as "Pink Dress" and when she asked how they would continue to build the tower when it was over the tallest girl's head, one of the SK/Year 2 boys yelled out from where he was building "Why don't you use a chair?" We took even more photos, gave them extra time, and then, when it was time for the students to leave the library for lunch,  the girls dismantled their tower with glee. (The second day I saw this class, "Pink Dress" went back to the Keva Planks and said "I want to see if I can make it even taller." She didn't reach the height from these photos, but I noticed she experimented with the structure layout more than before.)

The Oldest Learners

It was supposed to just be a quick ten-minute task so other students could have time to borrow books. The Grade 8 class, with their wonderful, responsive teacher, Ms. Wadia, had just finished playing Scattergories in small groups in the library. As the groups brainstormed words, Farah Wadia whispered to me between rounds about all the positive academic and social benefits this game brought to her class. To give something for the other students to do while a few conducted book exchange, I mentioned a tweet I saw (but neglected to like or save) in my Twitter timeline about a neat Keva Plank challenge and offered it to the Grade 8s: how far can you extend Keva planks off a table?

WOW! Students began with their Scattergory groups, grabbed handfuls of Keva Planks, and spread out throughout the library searching for tables, shelves and other flat surfaces to start building.

Here are a few of the initial experiments.

Group A: Building on the table with the data projector

Group B: Building on one of the Everybody book shelves

Group C: Building on the table with the TV

Groups D & E: Building on the table near the leather couch

Group F: Building on the circular table near the non-fiction section

 Once again, the process was just as fascinating and exciting as the final products were. Group A's structure started to extend further. After a few more attempts, Group B and Group C (with the encouragement from members of Group A) joined Group A and contributed their planks to Group A's project. Group D & E made several revisions to their designs, and then eventually joined together.

One of Group C's revisions

Group A's structure continues to grow

Newly united Group D/E with their altered structure

As the two structures continued to grow, the groups constantly evaluated their progress. They may not have realized it, but they were totally using the Engineering Design Process. Together, they examined the structure from all angles to check for any weaknesses. The conversations were focused and insightful as they plotted and planned. They started to realize that they needed more planks to be able to go longer. They first tried to use planks they already had but could not jeopardize the integrity of their structure. Negotiations began. Groups A and D/E begged Group F for their extra planks. The rulers started coming out to monitor the progress. Group A passed 30 cm first, but then Group D/E also passed 30 cm. Every time the structure was in danger of falling, screams reverberated in the library from the builders. It was intense! The bell rang, signaling the end of the school day, but the students refused to quit. Ms. Wadia (who kindly sacrificed her originally scheduled math lesson to allow the students to continue) reminded the Grade 8 girls on the soccer team that they had a practice; their response was that they still had time. Our principal walked in to see the students in action (I *may* have excitedly called him in to witness the engineering marvels) and the Grade 8s were too busy working to even notice him. When Group D/E's structure crashed, there were wails and triumphant hollers. The longest structure was an incredible 43 cm long! Now I wish I had kept a copy of that original tweet, to compare how long their structure was to ours!

School has ended and the Grade 8s from @mswadia’s class are still here working on a @KEVAplanks challenge (how far can we extend using just the planks?) - longest was 43 cm! @AgnesMacphailPS (more photos & process in next week’s blog) pic.twitter.com/nZcvsmM85M

— Diana Maliszewski (@MzMollyTL) September 27, 2018

The Grade 8s said that they could have done even better IF ONLY they had more Keva Planks to work with! Now you see why I had to buy more. Usually I'm not a big fan of teacher-initiated challenges for my MakerSpace, but it was perfect for this STEAM activity, a great impetus for our teen builders.

Both the JK and Grade 8 Keva plank users demonstrated a lot of academic and social skills during their building time. Naturally, the complexity of their tasks differed with their ages, but I loved how versatile this simple little set of planks were in the two tasks. I'm not a Keva planks salesperson, but I am sold on how, with the right open-ended tool and the right environment or prompt, some amazing STEAM tasks can spring up in the library completely unplanned but wonderful.