Painted Picnic Tables — $2,000

Curricular Area: Arts, Engineering
Grant Focus: Equipment
Schools: Whitson Elementary School
Items Purchased: Equipment to build and paint 10 picnic tables for outdoor education.

For this grant, we are proposing to create a community based project to build picnic tables for Whitson. The goal of this project is to help students recognize STEAM as a human endeavor as well as build a foundation of connection with our students and the larger community that we live in through science, engineering, and art.

In the winter/spring of 2022, the Enrichment program at Whitson plans to use the NGSS science and engineering practices to create a framework of exploring scientists, engineers, and artists through their unique character traits capturing the qualities of the scientists and introducing the human assets of scientists’ dispositions. In this process we hope to help our students understand that scientists, engineers, and artists are people and express a personal, human trait that enables them to become successful. The explicit teaching of a human character trait or disposition, along with learning the stories of scientists, engineers, and artists, will help to humanize children’s conceptions of scientists, engineers, and artists and the nature of their work. This curriculum links to biographical books about the accomplishments and early interests and inclinations of famous scientists, engineers, and artists. This focus helps us understand how the specific character traits both encourage and supports STEAM career choices. We will view scientists, engineers, and artists as explorers, imaginative, observant, brave, artistic, caring, resilient, fearless, and much more. This improved awareness of the nature of scientists’, engineers’, and artists’ work may be integral to inspiring the next generation of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The outcome of this project also hopes to strengthen family, school, and community connection. COVID required all of us to persevere through isolation. We learned how to change structures and to be flexible in our ways of doing normal. Whitson is capable of creating more outdoor learning environments for our students. In order to tie together the science biography curriculum and proposed art component, we will begin our studies with Charles L. Nielsen’s invention of the picnic table. The Painted Picnic Table Project will build ten 8 foot tables for outdoor learning experiences.