STEM Fair

A cool thing I’ve done while teaching has been helping plan and run (this Friday) our elementary STEM fair. Similar to a science fair, there are more than seventy students presenting experiments, investigations, and research. Student presenters and adults planning the event will be getting a T-Shirt with a custom, hand-drawn design (courtesy of a former coworker) and a certificate of completion.

Having the opportunity to witness student creativity and engagement in the STEM topics has helped build relationships with my students and has been greatly enjoyable. I am looking forward to the event happening this Friday evening.

Teaching STEM: Google Expeditions

Virtual and Augmented Reality is amazing. They are, in my opinion, the newest development in highly engaging technology. Taking students to see somewhere they have never heard of or been to, and relating new places to information being covered in class is amazing. I led a virtual expedition to the Grand Coulee Dam while talking about floodgates, building and programming Lego floodgates, and having students brainstorm, create ideas for and present information on a pollution-preventing floodgate. The real-life connections the students created between the content covered and practical applications while remaining engaged with each other and the expedition was incredible to see. I also observed Augmented Reality expeditions about dangerous animals/animal camouflage, extreme weather, and land forms. There was also discussion of companies that are working on VR Portals, and VR gloves and boots for more sensory immersion in the VR world.  The world of “Ready, Player One” is closer than any other science fiction before.

A list of all of the available Google Expeditions and accompanying lesson plans are available online, and the Google Expedition app is available to the public.

Teaching STEM: They Might Be Giants and StoryBots

What’s more fun than a dance party? A science song dance party! I stumbled upon They Might Be Giants a few summers ago while working as environmental educator, and have been using them ever since. They have several albums that are appropriate for the classroom, including Here Comes Science, with my favorite song How Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas) and second favorite Meet the Elements. Other albums I’ve used in the classroom include Here Come the 123’s and Here Come the ABC’s. The videos that are online of their songs are cute, students enjoy them and they provide a fun brain break when needed.

Another set of videos I have been using in classes have been the StoryBots videos. Not only do the Storybots cover the alphabet and numbers, there are also songs of the colors, animals, vehicles, jobs, science topics and classic nursery rhymes/children’s songs. Again, the animations of these videos are engaging, the students laugh at the robots as they go through short adventures in their videos.

Both They Might Be Giants and StoryBots are fun, educational music videos for brain breaks or activating strategies.

Teaching STEM: Lego Education

Legos have been and remain a well known aspect of childhood fun: building intricate castles and fortresses, bridges and city skylines. Bringing them into the classroom makes sense; including things that students have interest in can increase engagement in the material. Legos lend themselves to STEM, and the Lego WeDo 2.0 program is an introduction to not only following instructions to build a specific type of robot, but also programming the robot with drag-and-drop blocks. The Lego EV3 MindStorm sets are more intricate, both with the machines that can be built and the programming to control those machines.

In my classroom, I will be using the Lego Education kits with students in second through sixth grade, building machines from rovers and floodgates, to telegraphs and electromagnets.

A tip for using the kits, especially with the youngest students: have the learners organize the kits. That way they know if they kits become messy how much it takes to reorganize them and, in my experience, the students have been careful to put all of the pieces back correctly.

Teaching STEM

This is going to be a repeated section of the blog, with information about tools and methods for teaching STEM that I have come across in my current position of STEM Special Teacher for Kindergarten through 6th grade. I hope you enjoy!

Changing the World with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

I realized that I never posted about the internship I had this year. As of this September, I was a STEM Education Intern for the Girl Scouts in the Heart of Pennsylvania. I had several events that I am responsible for planning, all focused on STEM topics. The first, STEMStrong took place in the fall, and I then planned several other large and small events in the areas of engineering (Jelly Bean Structures), technology (Hour of Code, Video Game Developer), and forensic science (CSI Family Day). This opportunity was the most challenging thing I have done in the education field, and because of that, it was also the most rewarding. Prior to starting this internship, I would have said that I have some interest in the STEM field but was not the most comfortable with teaching certain aspects of it. Being responsible for standards-aligned activities for large (150) or more) and small  (10-15 at one event) groups of girls who ranged between kindergarten and twelfth grade was daunting, especially when planning the technology focused events. I had to make sure that I knew the information well enough to both instruct the lessons as well as answer any questions that may come up.

One moment that I am especially proud of occurred this winter during the first Video Game Developer program. There is an online program that the Girl Scouts had developed so scouts can see the basics of coding and developing, that I had planned to use in my lesson. The WiFi went out ten minutes into the program, so I had to come up with another activity to do while the girls and their parents were there. I had spend enough time planning and looking for possible activities to do, that I was able to come up with an alternate activity that still taught information about coding and did not require the use of the internet. That moment, along with others through my experience as an intern, solidified the fact that I believe my best quality as an educator is flexibility.

Some parents and troop leaders mentioned to me things along the lines of ‘My daughter was scared to come to a coding event, but you made it fun’ of ‘My troop didn’t want to be made fun of for going to an engineering event, because people say that engineering is only for boys’. Those statements meant a lot to me, because I believe that labeling content areas as being for certain genders is a social expectation that can and will be changed. There are skills and competencies that everyone can gain from STEM topics, just as there are skills and competencies everyone can gain from studying the arts.

On the other hand, some parents and troop leaders told me that the STEM program in the Heart of Pennsylvania Council had improved from the past. This filled me with pride as it showed that the work that I and my supervisor had been putting in was making the impact we desired it to. This also gave me the confidence to take the two extra PRAXIS tests to extend my general education certification through sixth grade. Since my main course of study is in child development, instruction and special education, knowing that I can effectively instruct the content areas that the higher elementary/middle level grades helped me take those tests, and has given me experiences I can speak about if I were to interview for a position teaching those grades.

I am so thankful to have been given this opportunity as an intern, and to continue my work with the Girl Scouts organization as Assistant Camp Director this summer.

For more information about the Girl Scouts and STEM:

http://www.girlscouts.org/en/about-girl-scouts/girl-scouts-and-stem.html

For this neat magazine geared more towards girls who like STEM:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-magazine-is-for-girls-who-unapologetically-love-science_us_590b63dee4b0e7021e9575c6?

I stumbled upon this great physics video

While looking for ideas for energy transfer activities for our STEMStrong event in November, I found this video on Conservation of Energy.

STEMstrong

Today was the first day of my internship with the Girl Scouts in the Heart of Pennsylvania, and I could not be happier with the decision to apply for this position. The first event that I will be working on is STEMstrong, in November. The three hour event, for fourth and fifth grade girls focuses on energy: energy in their bodies, energy in spaces and places, and energy required to move from place to place. I will be spending  the next few weeks planning standards-aligned activities for the event, and expanding the curriculum that has already been established.

STEM Education Internship

This past Friday, I was offered an internship with the Girl Scouts in the Heart of Pennsylvania, doing STEM Education. The Girl Scouts in the Heart of Pennsylvania serves 20,000 girls across 30 counties. In this position, I will be working to develop enhance the curriculum of the programs offered by the Girl Scouts for girls in grades K-12, where at the end of the program, the girls would earn a badge. These programs may have attendance of around 300 girls per event. I am excited to work in a different, more-hands on education setting, and am looking forward to expanding my skills. Having spent the summer doing environmental education, it is part of my personal philosophy that hands-on, meaningful experiences are an important aspect of education that is not always addressed. The internship starts this coming Wednesday, and I could not be happier to start.

Incorporating a Growth Mindset as a Teacher

In my Science and Technology Methods class, groups of undergraduate students are paired with students at the campus lab school to do some sort of STEM project. My group of kindergartner students are making catapults, which were tested yesterday. One student’s catapult did not work as well as a catapult should. There were flaws in her design and construction as we did not fully go into the concepts that make catapults work (angles, torsion, velocity, etc). Instead of telling her that her catapult did not work and that it was wrong, I told her that we will redesign it the next time we met, and that she should think about what could make her design better. We then, as a group, played a game involving catching the fuzzy pom-poms launched from the catapult that did work.

Having had teachers who did not think this way while I was in elementary and middle school generally disenchanted me from the science and math fields, but now that I have embraced a growth mindset for myself and for my current and future students, I understand better how to instruct effectively.