Immediately, the gears in my brain began turning to develop a plan for integration into my technology class. I was constantly pondering what grade level I would use it with and where would I even begin, but I finally decided to introduce this to my 4th grade students first since my 5th grade groups would be starting innovation lab first.
I began researching and came across some links posted to Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything. Kathy has listed tons of resources that can definitely get someone started in the right direction. However, one of the challenges I began to face was that no matter where I searched, mostly all of lessons or project ideas that I would stumble upon were for jr. high students or higher, not for elementary. So in order to organize my ideas better, I began pulling ideas and resources that I found into a document. Now, I'm definitely a lesson plan as you go individual, just because I will constantly think of new ideas in the car, on a run or I will stumble upon something on social media. Although, one of my main reasons that I don't lesson plan far in advance is because my students are constantly surprising me with their knowledge on topics or willingness to go look information up between classes so they can be prepared.
So, after gathering my resources and knowing this tool was probably new to most. I decided to begin my introduction to 4th grade with a mystery "what's our fragile futuristic tool?" activity. Once the tool was guessed, we began drawing what we thought a 3D printer looked like. That lead into a big discussion until it was finally unveiled and followed by a fun Kahoot survey to see what students may have known.
This activity took up our entire technology time and definitely left the students excited to come back and learn more!
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