While we each design and build our own board games, we’ll teach your staff how to use play-based creative activities to deepen inquiry and content learning. We’ll give you all the tools you need to create high-engagement projects without stress. We’ll talk about the creative process and how we can encourage resilience, reflection, question posing, problem solving, and collaboration. Educators will leave with new working language, lesson guides, and loads of new ideas to easily bring creative work to their classroom.

Not being good at things can be hard for teachers. In this workshop, we’ll pull back the curtain on failure and all it’s useful glory. Participants will be tasked to design, cut, and stitch a stuffie. Easy for some, not so easy for others. We’ll use this activity to talk through modeling strategies, self-reflection, classroom culture, student experts, and more. Educators will leave with loads of new strategies that promote failure, reflection, and resiliency.

Hands-on work is incredibly beneficial for everyone but especially for those kiddos where auditory processing is still a work in progress. While we use scrapwood, loose parts, and hand tools to design and build simple machines or rolling toys, we’ll discuss how creative work can trigger the flow state, calm high sensory input kids, create buy-in, and serve a variety of hard-to-reach kiddos. Creative work is also fantastic for ELLs especially if done to front-load academic content. Educators will leave with a variety of strategies to serve ND and ELL kids with lesson plans and a strategy cheat sheet.