Classroom
by Laura Kardys, K-6 grade Art Educator, Schaumburg IL
What is Clixo? In my 6-year old’s voice, “Clixo’s are toys with magnets that you can bend and move in different ways. If you build a car and you try and attach a Clixo the wrong way, you can make the car move on its own!” Awesome! Clixo’s aren’t just for building cars they are for building anything your imagination comes up with! They loosely remind me of what Hiro from Big Hero 6 creates!
In my 4-year old’s daughter’s voice, “Clixo’s help me create stories and act out different stories or pictures.” Here’s a picture of her Clixo creation she created to represent Disney’s Tangled/Rapunzel. The Tower, and on the bottom is Mother Gothel trying to climb up.
Bringing Clixo into my classroom has been very fun to see! I’m an Art Teacher who loves play and is always looking for ways for my students to tap into their creativity and create while having fun. Since introducing Clixo, my students have almost weekly asked if we will be using Clixo in the classroom.
I love Clixo in the classroom as lessons, brain breaks, early finishers, group work, independent study. The possibilities are endless and it’s easy and fast to clean up. A neat thing that happened while using Clixo is that it brought my students together. Some kids that usually don’t talk to each other, or create together/share ideas were now connected by their interest and love of Clixos, how cool is that?! Clixo is a friend maker!
In the first weeks that I introduced Clixo we definitely used the Activity Cards that come in the Classroom Pack. We started out creating individually, with each student using about 3-4 pieces to create a challenge. As we continued the challenges, we increased our members, working in teams of 3-4, then combining tables into groups of 6-8, also splitting the room in half, and lastly creating a massive structure as a whole class. The challenge, how can we be supportive of each other in sharing our ideas and also solve the challenge as our groups get bigger and our ideas start to expand or get layered, more people equals more unique ideas how can we all be heard.
I also started to see how we could use Clixo in a non-teacher facilitated format. This worked well for early finishers, independent work studies and brain breaks but were there other fun ways that we could use the Clixo toys to expand and lengthen play? Add new materials, new challenges?
My first attempt was using magnetic wands. It was fun to see how tall/high you could create something or how heavy before the wand doesn’t support the structure anymore, this was fun to see it collapse too! We tried magnetic cabinets and even school door frames and white boards, legs on tables and chairs. We kept thinking of other fun playing surfaces.
With my kindergartners we explored Clixos in a sensory bin. What would happen if we used Clixo and beans together? Clixo and colored rice? Clixo and Kinetic sand? My son was the one who sparked the idea of a shovel, then I brought that idea to school. Kinder-students had a great time using the Clixo shovel to scoop up pom-poms.
My daughter was the one who created a Clixo ball and started stuffing it with pom-poms. This became an instant favorite, and a nice quiet activity! She then would see the cause and effect. What happens if the ball gets rolled fast, slow is there a way to prevent pom-poms from flying out?
We also got hit with a major snow storm, so while things around us were being cancelled and everyone stayed indoors, I thought, “what happens if we brought Clixo outdoors or with the snow?” That became a fun new tool for the snow.
My son has always loved reading and books since an early age so together we decided to create letters/symbols associated with the Clixo pieces. This was a fun way to create messages. A poster of our letters would be fun to bring to school and have students leave messages or create messages for each other. A fun activity would be to split the class up into two groups, create a message then switch and decode each other’s messages, while working on literacy and decoding skills. That would be so cool!
The neat thing about Clixo is how versatile and easy they are to manipulate and work with. So excited to have these as part of our classroom and I hope in the years to come I’m able to expand on my set for school since my students seem to really enjoy them!
