STEM Ideas for Preppies!

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is so engaging for students in the primary years when each subject is integrated into ‘making’ activities. Students are learning through making, discovering, playing, exploring and along the way they make mistakes and have plenty of failures!

Over the last few terms students in Prep have had fun learning and ‘making’  STEM projects which addressed the Technologies curriculum.

Time to share some of them in a blog post…

  

Activity 1: Peg Puppets to perform a short puppet show. Animals mouths opened and closed with the use of the spring in the peg. A lever action, when the two prongs are pinched at the top of the peg, the prongs open up, and when released, the spring draws the two prongs shut.

 

Activity 2: The girls discovered that the Bee Bot travelled as far as most of their hand size, so charts were made to code the Bee Bot to move along the hands!

 

 

Activity 3: A data representation activity using Glyphs. Girls collected data about themselves to enter onto penguin Glyphs. The Penguin is our school mascot!

 

 

 

Activity 4: Designed and built a bridge for Blue Bot to cross. The girls sorted the correct materials needed to build the ‘Three Little Pigs’ houses, then used Bee Bots to follow a route to the right house.

 

 

 

Activity 5: Worked with components to make a fan to blow different materials….’objects are made of materials that have observable properties’. They constructed the fan after looking closely at each component and its capabilities.

Preps addressed the DT curriculum ‘Follow, describe and represent a sequence of steps and decisions(algorithms) needed to solve a problem’ through:

Activity 6: Watch and singalong to ‘An Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly’, then sequence the cards and pictures on a chart.

 

 

 

Activity 7: Girls re-told the story of “Goldilocks”, first sequence the story cards, locate sequence on mat and then programmed the Bee Bot to travel in the correct sequence.

 

 

 

Activity 8: Programmed a Bee Bot to travel from A – F pictures in alphabetical order.

 

 

 

Activity 9: Sequence LittleBIts to make a circuit to turn on the LED light, then match the sequence with pictures.

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Jackie Child
Jackie Child has been teaching primary aged students for 40 years in a number of countries. She is passionate about how children learn through constructivist pedagogy. She is a Teacher Librarian at St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School and a sessional tutor at Griffith University for pre-service teachers. Jackie doesn’t believe in standing still, there is always plenty to ‘do’ and learn!

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