Hi Everyone,
I was thinking last week about how back when @Audra_Selkowitz and I used to teach down the hall from each other, we would often team up with the other teachers on our side of the building and create a collaborative multi-class and multi-age Friday afternoon experience for our kids.
This worked really well when the weather was nasty and we couldn’t get the kids out to play, but it would be fun anytime of year, and you could easily do it with a STEM or robotics theme. We all had self-contained classrooms, and some flexibility to our Friday afternoon schedules, which made this easy to orchestrate, but even with kids having to leave for specials, etc., it could be doable, and of course you aren’t limited to Fridays. We all need a Fun Tuesday every now and then 
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Anyhow, each teacher would come up with an activity to host in their room, and then we would create student groups where we mixed up kids from all of our classes. This gave our students a chance to interact with kids from different classes, and of different ages. If we had four teachers, for example, we’d divide the afternoon up into half hour chunks, and then rotate the kids through each activity.
This would work great with 123, GO, IQ and VR Activities. Let’s imagine you have one teacher for each of those classrooms collaborating on a Fun Friday. The IQ teacher has several already build BaseBots, and all the students have at least spent a little time with VEXcode VR.
Room one could host the IQ Cube Crasher Challenge
Room two could host GO Animal Habitats
Room 3’s activity could be 123 Robot Parade
Room 4 could do draw simple shapes on the Art Canvas in VEXcode VR, or if you have VR Enhanced or Premium, Color by Number.
That’s just an example, but it helps to choose more open ended and easily differentiated activities. And, even if one of the activities is too easy or too difficult for some students, because they are in multi-age groups, they can either get help from their groupmates, or help them, both of which are great SEL experiences.
You could always theme these afternoons around a holiday, or have a building or coding only theme. You could also incorporate other subjects if you wanted - have a combination human and robot dance party to get kids moving in one room, and read a STEM themed book for some down time in another (or get your older kids to read to the younger ones!).
You can really customize this experience to your kids and the particular time of year. If you try something like this out, let me know how you adapted it for your environment!
