Last year was the first year I participated in the Pringles Challenge with 90+ fourth graders and their five teachers. It was one of the best STEM projects of the year. The Pringles Challenge is now accepting participants for this year: https://sites.google.com/site/newpringleschallenge/ Challenge: Students must design a unique package that will allow a SINGLE pringles chip […]
Posts with the STEM tag
Family STEAM Night
One of my favorite nights of the year is Family STEAM Night. During the 15/16 school year, we decided to turn Family Reading Night, which had low attendance into Family STEAM Night. The response was so large we had to split the families into two rooms based on grades and turn families away that had […]
Computer Science Week & Hour of Code
We are celebrating Computer Science week all month here in Kindergarten through Fourth Grade. We started last week with some unplugged activities and will continue with the traditional Hour of Code activities this week. Students will then progress into more complex tasks or onto coding some of our new robot friends. We have Ozobots, Dash from […]
Pre-K Bridges
The Pre-K students had a unit on transportation so we did their first STEAM project of the year building bridges. First we read: Bridges are to cross by Philemon Sturges. Then we looked at other real bridges and their shape. Students worked in partner to decide which shape they wanted their bridge to be. Once […]
NJ Teacher’s Convention
The first day of teacher’s convention was full of information. Today I presented on Augmented Reality and QR Codes. While it’s hard to see the benefits of AR in slides, click here to see my notes and ideas. Tomorrow I present on creating and iBook, creation and copyright. Download my iBook that is full of […]
STEM Poetry
We are lighting up our poems in second grade! During Poetry Month in April the second graders spend time using ReadWriteThinks interactive poetry websites. They wrote Acrostics, Diamantes, and Haikus. After learning about these 3 types of poems and others in their classroom students worked in small groups to brainstorm as many sources of light as […]
STEM Roller Coasters
My favorite part of the school year this year is probably teaching STEM/STEAM. The curriculum concepts, the thinking skills, and the personal skills the students have learned have made STEM days my favorite days of the week. The last few weeks the fourth graders have been learning about basic physics concepts by building roller coasters. […]
Coding and STEM in the local paper
While the details are not always right, it is nice to get the recognition for my program. http://newjerseyhills.com/echoes-sentinel/news/kindergarten-students-learn-basics-of-coding-in-watchung/article_eede83cd-37dc-5c80-b160-9fa2d1a497b0.html Hour of Code went great. Classes discussed the meaning of computer science and different jobs of computer scientists. They then moved me through lines of “code” around a grid had I taped out on the floor. We debugged […]