NW Noggin is excited to have arranged stipends from Bonny Slope Elementary in Beaverton Public Schools, for five experienced outreach experts to present three days of brains, art and theater to about 600 K-5 students!
Erin McConnell, Brianna Jacobs, Jacon Schoen and Penny Allen from Portland State University, and Matty McCasland from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, are busy planning three days of “neural activity” for about 600 eager K-5 kids! Here’s what they’ve come up with so far…
An introduction of several of the key brain areas. We’ll introduce a big picture of the brain with these areas labeled to point to:
Frontal
Parietal
Occipital
Temporal Lobes
Hippocampus
Amygdala
Each person should talk about an area for about 1 minute
Each person should also make a ‘prop’ (i.e. a special hat, a cape, etc.) for their brain area, because it will be a character in a play!
Then, a 5-10 minute play with each of the brain areas as characters…
For the little kids, we can be the actors and/or assign their teachers to play parts
For the older kids, we can ask for volunteers and assign some of the roles to them
Next, the kids will break into groups (they should already have been assigned to 1 of 5 groups), and each group will go to one of 5 different tables/stations. They will have 10 minutes or so at each station. We’ll assign someone to be time-keeper (a teacher or parent maybe), and to give a signal for when to rotate groups.
The 5 stations will be as follows
Real Brains
Writing/drawing on post-it notes and placing on 2 big paper brain lobes
Decorating the other 2 big paper brain lobes with stencils and/or free-drawing
Neuron signal racing w/pvc pipe neurons
Pipe-cleaner neuron construction
Finally, we reconvene as a large group, and ask questions (maybe we should each have a plan for 2 questions we will ask about what they learned), answer their questions, etc.
We could have a wrapping up activity… like a song. Here’s one possibility…
Sounds like a pretty amazing few days… 🙂