The Take Apart Centre

At the end of April, I had the pleasure of spending the day with my principal at the Dr. David Suzuki P.S. in Windsor, Ontario. What an amazing opportunity to see Full Day Kindergarten at its finest!

I learned so much from Joanne Pizzutti and the amazing kindergarten team of ECEs, EAs, student teachers and volunteers. What a team!

The classroom was amazing, as you can imagine, full of nature inside and out!

Each centre was carefully planned and set up for maximizing student learning, all while having fun.

I was completely drawn to the "Take Apart Centre" - a table full of small tools, electronics to disassemble and baskets for collecting and analyzing items, that I wanted to try this in my classroom as well.

We sent a letter home to parents and the items began to pour in!

A very big thank you to Mrs. T. for your generous donation of old laptops!

We are very fortunate to have s secluded hallway in-between my classroom and Mrs. Parisi's classroom, so we often use that space to invite students in both classrooms to explore and experiment. That's where we set up the Take Apart Centre so both classrooms could use it.

We added "safety glasses" for students to wear while working! They were a big hit!

Here are two students trying to take apart the clock radio.

Teamwork at its finest!

Many students wanted to tackle taking apart the radio so they moved it to the floor for easier access.

Great conversations were happening here including which tool would be best to use to take out screws of different sizes, how and what everything connected to, how things work, and even trying to put it all back together!

I love how this student used the scissors we placed in the Take Apart Centre to cut the wires and examine them in close detail.

It took a lot of patience and time to get the radio apart!

We left a variety of containers for students to collect and sort the things that they found. A group of boys used the muffin tin to collect screws, nails, and other pieces of metal.