Giselle Carranza has never used a compass in her second-grade math class. But someday, when her teacher pulls one out, she'll already know how to draw a circle with it. She's already done it in a different subject: toy making.
"I like it because it's fun," Giselle said of the eight-week after-school toy making program at Garrett Park Elementary School. Giselle, 7, has built several toys in the class, including her favorite, a turntable that told stories with her own drawings on it. "I use a lot of my toys at home to play with my dog," she said.
Giselle will also use the concepts she learns from building the toys in her regular school day. The program, designed by Garrett Park resident Karen Cole, helps children understand applied physical concepts about math and science before learning abstract concepts in the classroom. While making a toy, children learn about such things as friction and centripetal force by building devices that employ physics concepts.
"The way they normally learn in school is to learn a concept and then apply it. We turn that on its head," Cole said. Cole has a doctorate in educational psychology and founded Big Learning Inc., the nonprofit organization that developed the after-school programs using the hands-on strategy. Another Big Learning program teaches children to build structures like tents and castles. Big Learning programs are already in place at several schools, including two in inner city Baltimore, and at the Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club of America.
Cole said teachers of the curriculum are discouraged from showing students step-by-step what to do, instead teaching concepts and giving an overview that forces children to problem solve and ask questions. Students are not allowed to say "I can't," but rather, "Will you help me?"
"It almost always follows the same pattern," Cole said. "At first, they want to be told every step, they get frustrated very easily."
After a few weeks in the program, she said, children learn where they can improvise on a design and where something is essential for a mechanism to work. The toy making class constructs toys based on simple machines like levers, axles and springs.
"I've learned a lot about like, friction, and how things — what makes what work," said Matthew Melton, 9, of Kensington. The fourth-grader was frustrated last week with the masking tape he was using to make a crank flyer, a plane that flies around a spindle when a spinning crank is turned, because he said it wasn't sticky enough. It's just one of the problems regularly encountered when building something, he said.
"There's always something making something work, and it's usually really hard to do," Matthew said. He said he enjoys the class, which has taught him to see things in a new way.
"I like what we make and how we make it," Matthew said. "It's not always as simple as it looks, but you're able to do it in the end."
Currently, Big Learning programs are for children in second through fourth grades, but Cole said she is working to develop programs for older and younger students. She said the classes are effective with kids who have attention problems because they are hands on. Big Learning is also useful for children for whom English is not a native language, because the lessons are tactile and visual as well as verbal.
"We think we've hit upon a strategy for closing the achievement gap without dumbing down the curriculum," Cole said.
Sarah Early of Kensington said her son Eli, 9, took the Big Learning class building structures last year.
"He loved it," Early said. "He came home and he was excited about it. He couldn't wait to get in the car to tell me."
Early said she enrolled Eli, who struggles with reading in school, to "enrich him academically" and saw results. She said she would hear Eli use vocabulary words he learned in the class.
"I think that's what struck my husband and I about the program itself; he elaborated much more verbally," Early said. "I saw an eagerness. I saw a desire to want to learn."
