Makerspace at McDevitt Middle School

Lucy Clerkin, McDevitt Middle School Librarian

McDevitt Middle School Library/ Ms. Clerkin's Tech Literacy Class 
Lucy Clerkin, Librarian 
Barbara Walsh, Library paraprofessional 
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​When you have a library full of kids long before the start of the school day, it’s time to get creative, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. About three years ago, Library Teacher Lucy Clerkin and Library Paraprofessional Barbara Walsh, like many other library professionals, decided to build a MakerSpace. For us, that meant a space stocked with stuff mostly borrowed and found that we hoped would someday and somehow be transformed into something.

And then, three years later, it happened. There was a book, Calling All Minds: How to Think and Create Like an Inventor by Temple Grandin, a book about inventions and how they work, and a book about why things work the way they do. Calling All Minds is a book about inspiration filled with the coolest of projects including building your own marionette, creating optical illusions, and constructing your own stilts just like those I had one time in my own childhood. Calling All Minds is a book about inspiration, and it inspired us to take a look at all of the maker stuff we already had, reflect on our school values for creating safe and engaging spaces, and most of all having fun while making creativity happen.

Cardboard castle challenge inspiration

And then, and there was this quote:  “When I was young, my mother let me use every kind of material from around the house to create my experiments from her old clothes and scarves to the cardboard inside my father’s shirts when they came back from the cleaners. That cardboard was treasure!” With that in mind, morning library cardboard challenges took shape.

Enter the Cardboard Castle Challenge.

The rules:

• You can work in teams of two or more
• Your castle can’t be taller than one Math Teacher Ms. Woods 5” (see photo)
• Your castle can’t be wider than one Math Teacher Ms. Woods x 2: 4’ (see photo)
• Use cardboard and other found objects to build your castle
• Imagine, Build, Play, Share, Inspire​

This challenge is still in progress, and students are having a great time building their cardboard castles. As the challenge grows, we want to involve more students. Similar to the Global Cardboard Challenge project, we may add a writing and sharing element to the contest whereby students would make up a narrative to go along with their castle and share it with their school community. For now, it’s about keeping kids engaged in the library before the start of the school day.

​What are you making in your library?

Thanks for stopping by. Don’t forget to grab a friendship bracelet on your way out!