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Welcome to Design Lab

Shalom,

I am Rotem and I am so excited to teach Design Lab to JCDSRI students from PreK to 3rd grade (and learn with them!). We just ended our fourth week in Design Lab and I would like to share with you some highlights of our time together.

We began by asking: What do we do in Design Lab? How can we think like designers?

The students had great ideas: we build things, we create, we take something and make it into something different. Everyone loves to create and to explore the materials in the room, to build with Lego, K’nex, Lincoln logs, cardboard and more.

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Students’ name tags – you have to start with a paper roll…….

In Design Lab, we are learning about the process of Design Thinking. Design Thinking  is used to solve problems and create change in our world. The first step in this process is to look for problems. While not an easy task, the students were still able to share some great problems they are interested in solving:

  • Keeping our hands to ourselves
  • How to keep our stuff inside our cubbies
  • Food spilling in lunch box / water leaking in backpack
  • During quiet time it is hard to stay quiet
  • Caring for the guinea pigs in 3rd grade
  • Losing things
  • The way people judge your work
  • Playing ‘Monkey at the Bat’ during recess
  • Being distracted while working in class

We also started practicing paying attention to details. In Hebrew the expression for being empathetic is Lasim Lev — “putting your heart,” meaning we make sure to look with our soul and not only with our eyes. We played different games in which the students had to pay close attention to small details.

For example, I asked students to change one thing (the way you hold your hands, tuck your shirt in, untie your shoelaces, etc.) and can your partner notice the change?

Another was a visual memory game – who is missing from the class? What color is their shirt?

A long journey is ahead of us and it will be an interesting one.

Lehitraot (see you again)

Rotem