This week I had the absolute pleasure of visiting Ms. Amy Murhpy’s 6th grade classroom at Quantum Academy to see her Craft Lab and the 3 mobile creativity art labs funded by a school-wide Escondido Education Foundation (EEF) grant.

Full disclosure: I have had at least one child at Quantum Academy since 2016. So not only am I very familiar with this school and their staff, but I am rather partial to their learning environment. Additionally, two of my kids have had Ms. Murphy as their home room teacher and my youngest currently has at least one class with Ms. Murphy.

The grant

Every year, the EEF fulfills grant requests at multiple levels – for individual teachers, for a team of teachers, and for entire schools. Grant funding is tied to the scope of its impact, with school-wide grants providing the largest budget – up to $5000. For the 2024-2025 school year, Ms. Murphy won a grant for 3 Mobile Creativity Art Labs to be shared across the school.

So what are these Mobile Creativity Art Labs? They are self-contained Cricut workstations set on large mobile workbenches, an idea Ms. Murphy came up with and pitched as a grant idea to the Escondido Education Foundation in 2024.

The mobile carts have storage that includes materials and supplies to create projects using Cricut Maker machines. Cricut Maker is a smart cutting tool that is popular with crafters and makers. Students use the Cricut software to create designs, then load the machine with the material they want cut, such as paper, vinyl or felt, then use the cut materials in various projects.

Each cart also has a Canon Pixma printer that can print on the oversized 12”x12” paper that works with Cricut, and two laptops that can connect to the Cricut. The laptops were already owned by the school, but had become slow and obsolete for most uses. They were wiped and refurbished by IT to become dedicated laptops for use with the Cricut machines.

The idea

Quantum Academy has a Maker Lab area near the 5th grade classrooms with supplies for all grades, but Ms. Murphy wanted to create a self-contained creativity lab that would have all the supplies needed for projects in one place that could be brought into the classroom. She wanted something hands-on for the students, and she was inspired by the Cricut Venture that 8th grade teacher Ms. Carpenter had gotten for an after school class.

The Cricut Venture is a free standing cutting machine that works on larger format materials and is popular with students. But its size makes it impractical for a mobile cart. The Cricut Maker is a desktop machine that fits well on the mobile workbenches.

To complete her idea, Ms. Murphy chose Husky mobile workbenches that have storage drawers that can hold not only the various materials and tools used with the Cricut Maker, but also the Cricut machines themselves, the printers and the laptops used for making designs. And to make them even more versatile, the workbenches have a built in power strip and a foldup worktop that more than doubles the work surface of the cart.

While the carts are loaded with tools and materials, some supplies from the grant are stored in Ms. Murphy’s Craft Lab in her classroom. The supplies shown below are a mix of items from the EEF grant and other sources.

Projects

Although the carts were still being finalized when I visited, the Cricut Makers have been in use for a couple of months.

Many students have been working on felt busy books to be donated to Transitional Kindergarten and Kindergarten students. These busy books have interactive pages with felt pieces that attach with Velcro. (Many thanks to Ms. Murphy for sharing many of the photos included in this article.)

Although the Cricut Maker has software where students create their designs, before they even get into the software, Ms. Murphy has her students first sketch out their design with pencil and paper. Despite the high tech nature of these art labs, they provide a blend of hands-on and digital design, from physically drawing out the design during the planning stage, to assembling the finished product from various cut out materials.

Although it was still in the box, Ms. Murphy pointed out the Circut Autopress she also got with her grant. Her students will be using it to create Quantum Academy’s team t-shirts for the annual STEM Challenge event this year. Students always design the team t-shirts for the competition, but this year, they will be able to use their new Cricut tools to make the design, cut it out, and press it onto their t-shirts instead of having to order them from a supplier.

The carts are currently getting their finishing touches, being organized and stocked, and will soon be released to grades 4, 7 and 8 later this month. But their mobile design means that any class can easily borrow one of the carts.

Student led

When I visited on Thursday, several of Ms. Murphy’s students were getting the mobile carts set up in the great room so they could demonstrate how to use the Cricut software and machines to the other teachers who will be able to use the mobile art labs with their students. I had the chance to talk to Peyton, one of the 8th grade students who was there to help out.

Peyton and Caliah have become good friends at Quantum Academy, and thanks to the influence of Ms. Murphy, they have taken on a number of leadership roles. I was impressed with how mature and confident Peyton seemed while talking to me, yet she told me that she used to be nervous about speaking in front of others.

Speaking in front of the whole school isn’t something she thought she would ever want to do. But Ms. Murphy has a way of pushing her kids outside their comfort zone and helping them see their potential. For Peyton and Caliah, that has meant stepping into leadership roles they wouldn’t otherwise have chosen, such as leading the school’s Aquatica event at the beginning of the school year and the Quantum Olympics. Not only was Peyton one of four students staying after school on Thursday to help train teachers on the Cricut software, she and other students have already trained students across all grades at Quantum on how to use the machines.

Ms. Murphy empowers her students to be teachers themselves. In fact, Peyton was able to take one of the newly acquired Cricut machines home over winter break to experiment with it, putting her in a better position to help her peers learn how to use the machine after break. The felt crayon page in the section above was one she made at home.

It was easy to see why Ms. Murphy was chosen as this year’s Quantum Academy Teacher of the Year!

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