Teaching STEAM

  In this series, I am sharing how I design my STEAM curriculum.    Post #1 - The introduction ,   Post #2 - After the topic is chosen ,   Post #3 - Wind tunnels ,  Post #4 - Recruiting an Expert , Post #5 - Preliminary plans for hosting a paper airplane contest , and this post I will share the Next Generation Science Standards that align with this curriculum.  I have14 days of 50 minute periods to work with around 180 3rd through 5th-grade students. This unit will start at the beginning of the school year, so I need to plan time for everyone's reentry to school routines. I am fairly confident this unit will be highly motivational to most students. Students will be exposed to science, technology, engineering, art, and math through this integrated unit. Students will be exposed to the following fundamentals. Science - scientific inquiry, properties of matter, motion and forces, fluid dynamics, transfer of energy.  Technology - design proc...

In this series, I am sharing how I design my STEAM curriculum.    Post #1 - The introduction ,   Post #2 - After the topic is chosen ,   Post #3 - Wind tunnels , Post #4 - Recruiting an Expert , and in this post, I will be sharing with you my preliminary plans for hosting a paper airplane contest.  You may be wondering why I am sharing about creating a paper airplane event before I've shared the standards, scientific principles, lesson objectives, and activities. Rest assured, I've been working on those too and will get to them in due time. I tend to be a big picture person. I want to know what the students are working towards. Sure, you could say they are working toward mastery of the standards. That doesn't cut it for me. That type of thinking didn't interest me as a child and it doesn't do much for me as an adult. I am a seeker of fun, memorable events, competition, and community. So, I will put in the extra effort to create a culminating activ...

I'm still writing in hopes that this material helps people. In this series, I am sharing how I design my STEAM curriculum.    Post #1 - The introduction ,   Post #2 - After the topic is chosen ,  Post #3 - Wind tunnels , and in this post I discuss a conversation I had with a friend who is an airplane mechanic and former flight instructor. The logistics of having a guest speaker visit the school is a challenge. Sure, the school is very s upportive of having guest speakers. It's simply that I teach nine classes of STEAM stretched over 3 days. I don't want to wear out my resources by asking any volunteer to visit the school for 3 consecutive days. Especially when I know they will have to take time off from work to speak. My plan is to set aside one morning for the visit. I am hoping to have the speaker stay long enough to meet with the fifth and then the fourth grade. The third-grade groups will do something different. I am also planning on asking the other specia...

 Greetings to everyone who is following me. In this series, I am sharing how I design my STEAM curriculum.    Post #1 - The introduction ,  Post #2 - After the topic is chosen ,  and in this post, I will talk about one of my random ideas, wind tunnels. It seems crazy, even to me, that I would be thinking about building wind tunnels with 3-5th grade students during a 14-day unit. Rest assured, this is only an idea. There's no guarantee that I will act upon this idea. However, I did find some good information and resources.  Before I get too excited about wind tunnels, I must let you know, I did flesh out the Next Generation Science Standards that I will cover in this curriculum. Yes, I will share them with you in a later post. They weren't the first thing I thought about, but I know it is necessary to identify them. Enough about the standards and on to wind tunnels.  As I was looking through the books I mentioned in my first post of the series, I came ...

 I'm writing a series of blogs about how I design my STEAM curriculum. This is the second post in the series. In the first blog of this series , I shared how I decided on the curriculum topic. In this blog, I will share my initial steps toward designing the curriculum once the topic is chosen. STEAM Curriculum Topic - Aeronautics In the last post, I mentioned all the books I collected from my shelves once I decided on the unit. Most of them were about folding paper airplanes. I remember doing some origami with a group of third-grade students last year. A small handful of students were able to follow the directions. Most of the students were frustrated trying to understand the folds. I think - I need to develop a plan to support students who find that folding paper is difficult while allowing those who have experience folding paper to move forward.  (I highlighted this thought because I will need to address it in another blog post.) Next, I think - What else can we do besides f...

I belong to a Facebook group called Teaching STEM. It's a private group for Elementary STEM Specials teachers. There are 16.8K members. It's typical to hear pleas for help. Here's one request, "I am a new STEM teacher - How do you set up your year?" If I scroll past a few posts I come across another, "I have just been moved from science to our school's maker space... Now I have to design a K-5 curriculum.... Any suggestions on where to start with a curriculum?" I responded to one post, sharing how I develop my curriculum. (In my circumstance, I teach STEAM to 3-5th grade students. I see each class for 50 minutes once every 3 days. This averages out to 14 classes a quarter.) After sharing what I was doing, a couple of people responded with interest in my plans and asked me to share. I want to share my plan, but it's not as easy as pulling out some pre-published curriculum and saying, "Here, follow this." So, I am responding to the reque...