When first grade teachers at Columbia River Gorge Elementary needed Jemtegaard Middle School students to lend a hand, Greg Lewis gladly offered his Medical Detectives class to help. The project goal was for elementary students to learn how the human hand functions.
“Our first-grade teachers are working to add more engineering and problem solving into our curriculum,” said Allison McGranahan, CRGE first grade teacher. “We are currently studying the human body which includes the skeletal and muscular systems. We looked at several learning projects that incorporated engineering into the study of hands and they were daunting to facilitate with an entire classroom.” That’s when the teacher team of McGranahan, Sydney Termini and Rachell Calvary-Reeves considered asking for a class of middle school students next door to help lead small group learning.
Using paper hands along with string, straws, tape and beads, older students helped the younger students to explore how the muscular and skeletal systems work together to make a hand move.
“It was fun and interesting to work with first graders,” said JMS 8th grade student, Kaylia Pierce. “They do not think the way that we do. Some of their ideas were pretty interesting.”
Pierce said a challenge was the need to explain things in different ways for various students to get the concepts and to allow a student to fail as a part of the learning experience. “They had some ideas that would not work, and you had to guide them to the right answers,” she said. Pierce, a student in the Medical Detective class, wants to be a doctor some day.
“There is a lot of value in bringing these middle school students in to our classrooms,” said McGranahan. “This work supports team building and builds leadership skills for the older students. And it’s important for our elementary students to problem solve with someone other than their teacher and who is closer to a peer. I think they all had a lot of fun.”
