I too wish I had been exposed to lasers in kindergarten, but then again I’m sure I would have used it for something entirely inapproperate or burnd the building down 
@Drewperman I’m so pleased by the effort you are taking to introduce things like the GF to these young people.
“No Mr Bond, I expect you to learn…”
Soooo awesome…wish in my day…well…we had stone axes…they had this type of tech…
I look forward to watching the kids design something then bring it to life. In kindergarten cutting skills can get in the way of bringing ideas to life. We will still be working on those skills but we will have this as a tool as well.
Something resonates in me with wanting to do a hand turkey for thanksgiving - but utilizing the built in trace function. New take on an old tradition perhaps but think it would be cool for the kids to see their work transformed in such a way.
Hello fellow teacher!
I used school to justify ordering my Glowforge. I told myself that if I could come up with 50 things I could use it for in class I could get one - here’s my list
My kids are a bit older than yours - 9 and 10 year olds, but you might be able to get a few ideas out of it.
Would it be ok if I saved a copy of that doc and took some inspiration from it for my 9-year old nephew?
A hand turkey was actually @dean’s first test of the trace function! Can confirm, works great. 
I believe my words at the time were: “This is the killer app for the Glowforge. This is it. Hand turkeys!”
Can confirm, predicted hand turkeys as killer app from the start.
Hand turkey growth chart!
Just be sure to remove hand between scan/trace function and cutting function!
Kindergarten supplies check list:
@dan Does the trace function work with crayons and pencils or only markers? Either way would be fine but we tend to do a lot of crayon work lol.
One thing I find handy (even at the graduate and post-doc level where I teach) is that relations between abstract things become way easier to understand when you can hold and view relationships between the concepts. Learning anatomy from a book is hard, learning anatomy from a puzzle that goes together like the real parts way easier.
It would be an even better project to have the kids design a teaching model (like a body where the body parts only go together in the right way) and of course you can swap parts to make the person tall, short, have a prosthetic hand, etc so kids learn diversity. You can make other versions (differences between planes, trains and automobiles by making them match up with the medium [train + tracks, etc]). The cool thing is you can whip them out quickly, and they can color them or you can have them design them to teach other kids (because if you can teach it you really know it)…
For the moment it’s tuned for sharpies, but other drawing supplies are definitely in the feature hopper.
That’s kind of what I figured but hey it was worth a try. Thanks for the response. I look forward to getting the ol’ forge.
any chance of ink jet onto the proof grade into the hopper for when we just can’t get one of the supported file types?
How soon before Back-to-School shopping lists start including "acrylic samples, veneer swatches, 3x5 baltic birch packs, safety(laser) glasses… 
You can absolutely scan a drawing with the ‘trace’ feature, remove the drawing, and then print over material.