Central Greene ‘Fab Lab’ students assist in decorating Christmas tree
Fifth-grader Grant Chapman helps hang the 958 snowflakes made this year by Central Greene Elementary Center students to decorate the Christmas tree in front of the Greene County Courthouse.
Central Greene kindergarten students watch snowflakes being cut with a laser in the Intermediate Unit I Fab Lab that came to the school in October to show students how technology works.
WAYNESBURG – There are hundreds of wooden snowflakes on strings dangling from the Christmas tree perched on the Greene County Courthouse steps, each with a different story.
With the help of volunteers from the Bucket Fillers of Central Greene Elementary – and cutting-edge technology – Waynesburg’s big community Christmas tree was decorated Nov. 27 with a beautiful arrangement of ornaments.
Central Greene fifth-grader Grant Chapman held up his end of a string of snowflakes, no two alike, as the bucket truck from the Waynesburg-Franklin Volunteer Fire Department hoisted them high in the air, wrapping strand after strand around the branches.
“Every class is tied with a different color string, so I think I can find mine.” Grant said as he squinted upward. “Maybe…”
Yes, somewhere in those 958 snowflakes made by Central Greene students, teachers, administrators, aides and even the lunch ladies, Grant’s snowflake is hanging – a tribute to the joy of using art and science to teach children about sharing good things.
Decorating the tree that the Waynesburg Moose donates every year to the county was brought to the attention of elementary Principal Scott Headlee last year around Christmas time. Students were already Bucket Fillers – a program that teaches them about filling their inner “buckets” and those of others with courage, loyalty, hope, love and honesty.
“The Moose thought it would be a good project for our students to make the ornaments for the tree,” he said. “I had a vision that decorating the tree would allow (the students) to share this with the community.”
Headlee got together with art teachers Rachel Kelley and Lisa Kalsey and the brainstorming began.
The Intermediate Unit I Mobile Fab Lab, with its 3-D printers, laser cutters, computerized lathes and computer fabricating programs was a perfect fit for this project that would turn paper snowflakes into laser-cut wooden ornaments.
“With our focus on science, using new technology gave each student a chance to participate and they got to see that whatever your mind can conceive you can create,” Headlee said.
The art teachers were already familiar with the Fab Lab, a platform for teaching science, technology, engineering and math. As a mobile unit, it is designed to go to schools and places in the community to teach technological design techniques to students and the public at large.
“Rachel and I were taking advanced education classes at the Fab Lab so we were excited that our kids would get a chance to use it too,” Kalsey said.
When school started in September, every student from kindergarten through fifth grade folded paper circles and cut their own snowflake that Kalsey and Kelly numbered for identification, before photographing against them a black backdrop. These images were emailed to Fab Lab educator Brandon Prentice, who programed them into the laser cutter. Thin sheets of plywood were purchased and hundreds of ornaments were ready to be born.
When the mobile unit rolled into the school parking lot the week of Oct. 17, students got to scramble up the steps and see their snowflakes get traced onto the wood then slowly be cut deeper with each pass of the laser until they were done.
While touring the lab, Prentice had 3-D printers running, creating little green and blue plastic robots, airplanes and puzzle pieces. Wide-eyed kids were experiencing 21st-century technology in action.
“They saw that 3-D printing is like using a glue gun. It gets hot then it draws with the hot plastic,” Kalsey said.
Then came the hard work of turning fresh plywood into weather resistant keepsakes and getting them ready to be strung around the tree.
“We recruited all the related arts teachers, the guidance counselor and anyone else who wanted to help and we varnished and put strings on all the snowflakes during a parent teacher day,” Kalsey remembered with a grin. “It was a 12-hour day and we skipped dinner but we got them done.”
Kelly’s fifth-grade “TV” newsroom, WCES News, spread the story at school and sent a video to the school board explaining the snowflake project and their ongoing mission to be “Bucket Fillers” of good thoughts and deeds.
As part of the project which was funded through the school’s state Keystone Opportunity grant, a vinyl sign cutter was purchased and used to make a sign to stand with the tree to let the community know about Bucket Fillers and how Central Greene is dedicated to connecting its students to the world they live in.
“It was a lot of work,” Headlee said.
He was the one who made the concrete anchors for the sign, built the wooden backing and wired each classroom’s string of ornaments together to make the long strands that the bucket truck would lift into place. When it was time to trim the tree, Headlee and a host of volunteer teachers, parents and students were there on the courthouse steps to help the firemen finish the job.
At the Waynesburg Holiday Open House earlier this month, Headlee saw many of his students dragging their parents and grandparents over to the tree in an attempt to find their ornaments.
“We want to fill our ‘buckets’ with character and learn how to give it back out, and this project did it.” Headlee said. “Now they are connected to the community in a way that they weren’t before.”