Time 2 Tinker @ La Honda Elementary

La Honda Elementary is nestled among the towering redwoods and rolling, coastal foothills of rural San Mateo County. Our small school currently serves 69 students, Preschool to fifth grade. We have a close-knit school and a strong sense of community pride. Geographically, we are isolated from many opportunities, educational and otherwise, due to our rural location. Our students benefit from a variety of enrichment and learning opportunities that our beautiful town and the surrounding nature has to offer, but certain learning opportunities that are found in nearby Silicon Valley are not readily available within our community.

Our students eagerly explore and work in our abundant school garden, get creative with art and get lost in the world of music, but they are lacking STEM related opportunities that will allow them to tinker, explore, innovate, inquire and design. We are in need of a Makerspace to promote and encourage their curiosity.

"A Makerspace is a place where students can gather to create, invent, tinker, explore and discover a variety of tools and materials." -Diana Rendina

As we begin the process of bringing a Makerspace to La Honda Elementary, we envision a multi-year process as we collectively create a space that supports what our students are curious about. We want to start with where our students' current interests are: constructing with cardboard, exploring circuits, simple engineering with blocks and LEGOs, tinkering with LEDs and motors, along with an exploration into video and animation. We want to provide the materials needed for those interests to be put in action, as well as other essential starter materials (paper clips, hot glue guns, scissors, paper, etc). As the students evolve in their skills, the Makerspace will need to evolve with them. Our hope is to bring more advanced coding opportunities, robotics and 3-D printing as the evolution of our Makerspace takes place.
#WeAreMakers #LHEmakers