Whether your students need a brain break or you're in need of a STEM activity, KEVA towers are an easy place to start.

Transcript

Welcome to the World’s Easiest Lesson Plans. I'm Ken Scheel, the founder of KEVA Planks, and all of these lessons will be using KEVA Planks. You'll find that these lessons are quick and easy to prepare for, and they're also very easy to implement. At the same time, they're engaging and effective.

You'll find that it makes your classroom a playful place and a place that both you and your students are more excited to be there in the classroom. Ultimately, my hope is that these activities are going to have a transformative impact on your students and the way that they view school, lifelong learning, and their future.

We'll do all this with the World’s Easiest Lesson Plans. Let's get started with the very first one. This is one of my favorite introductory activities for people who have never seen or built with KEVA Planks before. The prompt is: build a tower as tall as you are. You have 15 minutes. You can work by yourself or work with others, whatever you prefer. And that's all there is to it. We have a lesson plan. I just suggested 15 minutes, but you could do a prompt where you're only giving them five minutes and they only have 40 planks each. Or just build a tower that is 12 inches high.

You can adjust the length of the challenge according to the amount of time that you have or the number of planks that you have available per student. Then after whatever your time constraint is, after they've been building for a while, invite people to walk around the classroom and view the other structures that have been built. People are concentrating on what they've been doing, and sometimes they have not looked around to see what else is happening. It's really helpful for them to observe, appreciate, and learn from what other people are doing.

They will quickly become better builders and do more complex things as they learn from what other people have done and start to combine their ideas with ideas that other people have had.

You can ask them questions as they are looking around, such as:

• Are these towers mostly similar?
• Are there some different general types of towers?
• Are there any structures that look super original where people did something that nobody else did?

When you're all done, they can knock those structures down and put them away. You can then move on to something else. It could be another KEVA activity or it could be something totally unrelated.

Hope that is helpful and we will look forward to sharing another prompt and activity next time. Have a great day!

This transcript has been edited for clarity.