Some weeks life runs smoothly. Other weeks I’m bailing water by the bucket full.
Last week, this was me:
![Kookaburra, H. J. (2012 July 23). "Dec.10,1993: Drama. Ex-ASR KUNGAH MARIS sinking as HMAS HOBART [II] approaches - Scott Corson Collection" [Online image]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/41311545@N05/7627833146/](https://icecreamcoffeeteacher.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/sinking-ship.jpg)
Kookaburra, H. J. (2012 July 23). “Dec.10,1993: Drama. Ex-ASR KUNGAH MARIS sinking as HMAS HOBART [II] approaches – Scott Corson Collection” [Online image]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/41311545@N05/7627833146/
Having received my Squishy Circuit kit, the time had come to actually adapt this bad boy to my educational context. I made the dough and spent an afternoon with my kids making LED lights light-up with play dough. It was pretty neat, to be honest – my three year old was impressed at the very least and complained when it was time to clear the table for dinner, a sure sign of success. (And, when the electricity went out at a restaurant we were trying to eat at last night, he actually had a decent idea of why the lights weren’t working – bonus! Shameless mommy-brag, sorry. Back to my “creation while drowning” experience.)
As much fun as the play dough was, I struggled to see how to connect the idea of basic circuits to Language Arts standards. Maybe we could sculpt luminous metaphors? It was an idea, but I wasn’t super crazy about it.
I did a bit of digging around online to try and stir up some ideas. It was fun seeing little kids learn about circuitry, but anything more advanced seemed to require basic computers, which was a bit beyond my skill, and certainly beyond my reach for this sub-par week.
I went thrifting and found a music box which I thought I might be able to rework to run with the little motor that came in the kit. I came home, pulled it apart as much as I could. I couldn’t find a way to removed the right pieces without taking a hammer to the thing, so that dream died pretty quickly. I remembered that our instructors had reminded us about the need to be comfortable with failure and tried to reframe the smashed music box in a positive light. I couldn’t quite manage that so I wrapped the parts up so I wouldn’t have to look at them.
I pulled out another of the pieces of the kit that I hadn’t explored much yet – the buzzer. “What a horrid noise!” I thought as I hooked it up. I pulled it out of the play dough quickly, only able to stomach very short sounds, wondering what possible purpose such an annoying device could hold. And then, as I was listening to the sequence of the noise, it occurred to me that this sounded an awful lot like a telegraph machine! I made a quick makeshift play dough bridge that I could manipulate to bypass the buzzer on the circuit, looked up Morse Code and sent my first telegraph into the atmosphere . . .
S (di-di-dit) O (da-da-dah) S (di-di-dit).
How appropriate for the week I’d been having! Ha!
My initial design was not user friendly, so I went around the house collecting materials I thought I might use to make a device more resembling a real telegraph machine. I only ended up needing two of the materials – Duplos and a clothespin. The clothespin had the right amount of tension in its spring to lift and replace the bridge. Every time it lifted the bridge a short burst of sound could come from the buzzer making the dits and the dahs of Morse Code distinguishable. I also insulated the buzzer a bit by attaching it to a Duplo brick for the sake of my sanity.
This is what the new contraption looks like:
I’ve brainstormed different ways I might be able to reach ELA standards with a play dough telegraph. Certainly the idea of a telegraph is to make communication as short as possible while still getting across your main ideas. A lot like text talk, to be honest. Hmmm . . . maybe we could teach summary that way. Boil down a short story into a sentence easily transmitted in code. Maybe. A start, anyway.
This is where I ended the week:
My current plan is indeed to link the modern idea of text talk back to the days of the telegraph, and then bridge into a discussion of summary (for those using Common Core ELA has two summary standards one for literature and one for informational texts – either could be used for this idea). The same skill of boiling down a body of text into key points and main ideas is used in each, so this shouldn’t be too difficult. In the PBL context of the school I work for, I’m considering a driving question something like: “How can effective communication happen quickly?”
I’ll keep you posted as to my progress. My play dough telegraph can’t send an S.O.S. very far, so you’ll just have to check back here to see if this next week yields more successful results or not.
*Note: Multimodal elements help to visually tell the story, connect to readers on a personal level, provide necessary detail for DIY moments and add a overall sense of fun.
The Ice-Cream Coffee Teacher 
