On the move

This is our first year as a STEM school. I have the privilege of leading this work as an Instructional Coach. As a school we have been building a STEM identity for a few years but now I have dedicated time and funds to grow our STEM identity. A key component of this transformation has been our adoption of  Project Lead the Way  curriculum. We have received tremendous support from community partners  to make this possible. Most of the grade level teams have started or completed their first module of the curriculum. As a staff we reflected on this at an academic seminar last week. One teacher shared that a student in her class who has academic and social challenges emerged as a leader and the whole class cheered when he completed a difficult task with the best results. She also noticed that students who were not "typical" leaders in her class excelled during the Robotics module. Another teacher reflected that the material was challenging to learn as an adult and she wondered ho

Our 3rd year of the McKinney Summer Program was our most successful to date! The numbers speak for themselves. Success knows no season!

There is a lot of information, opinions, Pinterest pictures and blog posts that could answer this question. What I have determined from my reading of blogs, Twitter and experience is that a makerspace is what the students make it. Good prompts help the students discover attributes of materials and spark ideas but students will take this and make it there own. Observing students navigate the making process is finest example of self-differentiated learning. Students access the materials that they are ready for and manipulate them into ideas that are only limited by their imagination. Now I have read about how wondrous this is and the limitless possibilities but I still worried is it enough or will they need more support? I can't say that I have a definitive answer to these questions because each student is in a different place. I can say that working with my students has shown me that they need many more opportunities to experiment with materials before they will risk big ideas. I ha

Through the generosity of  Chevron's Fuel Your School Program , I received six  Sphero Ollies  last fall. Over the school year my students and I have experimented with different apps to learn programming using the Ollies. The students were motivated to learning coding while using the Ollies. There is of course a level of frustration that comes with learning something new. Most of my fourth grade students were able to program the Ollies using the  Tickle app  on the iPads. There was a lot of moving forward at full speed and crashing into walls before they got the hang of it. I introduced the Ollies to the summer program students. I started with the older students. I discovered that some of them did not have enough experience with basic block coding. This made programming the Ollies very difficult for them. The easy solution was for them to work on  Code.org  to gain the coding experience they needed. The challenge came when the younger students really wanted an opportunity to us

Week 4 of our summer program started with straw rockets. Students explored how changing the nose of their rocket or the wings affected how far it would travel. With the help of an older student, we recorded the distance traveled by each rocket in a Google Sheet. We used this data later in the week for a math talk. We discussed how to organize the data to answer questions and make predictions about how far most rockets would travel. This math talk was mostly an introduction to data analysis but helped students what can be done with information they collect. Our week continued with building wind powered cars. This activity comes from  PBS.org . This activity has a high excitement level as students get to see their creations roll or even fly. As we have engaged in each of these activities it's been interesting to observe how students approach the engineering design process. Some students jump in with little to no instruction or models and are comfortable building and design

Our 4th week of the summer program was all about building towers. The students built towers from index cards, Q-tips, rubber bands, Legos, and playing cards. The constraints of the building projects changed each day. One day they were allowed to manipulate the cards by bending and using tape, other days they could not. As they worked with the variety of materials they learned about the properties of the materials and how to build with them. The students challenged themselves to build the tallest free standing tower possible. They tried to build their tower so that it stood taller than the tallest student. Along the way they discovered which structures were the most stable. Ideas for these building challenges came from  Educating Young Engineers  and  Teacher Web from Canyon Middle School . 

In our summer program, we mixed off-line and on-line engaging activities.  Prodigy , an on-line math game has proved to be very engaging to all of our students. The best part is that they love it and they are still working on their math skills. Win-win! Another engaging and consistent component of our program is an off-line, old fashioned book read aloud. Our youngest students are read to everyday. Our staff does an excellent job of asking the students questions and making connections to the stories with the students. The list of books we are reading this summer came from the KQED Mind/Shift blog. One of the blog entries included a list of picture books  that support spatial skills development. Another blog entry included  picture books  that have diverse characters. The students are enjoying the books and so are the adults who are reading them. We are all enjoying being learners together.

Boats, coding, robotic friends and circuits made learning fun on our short, second week of the summer program. Independence Day made for a short week of the summer program but we were still plenty busy. We designed and tested aluminum foil boats on Monday. We started testing the capacity of the boats with pennies and quickly ran out of pennies. We then used plastic sea creatures from our math curriculum. The record was 146 sea creatures in one boat! Our school has just been named as a  STEM Transformation School  by our school district. As part of our STEM transformation we will be expanding our implementation of  Project Lead the Way  curriculum. Projects like building simple boats from foil have helped to introduce the engineering design process to our students. Our kindergarten and fourth grade students experienced Project Lead the Way this past school year and we are excited to expand to all of our classrooms next school year. We continued our week with some cod

Our third year of summer program started with roller coasters. This activity was popular with the students last year and is a thrill again this year. What is even more thrilling is that our first day we had 46 students! This is a higher one day total than any day last summer. We continued building roller coasters on day 2 and added in some programming with  Sphero Ollies  and the  Tynker app . Students practice their math facts with MobyMax  and explored current events with  Newsela . We filled all of our tables for the free lunch served by our district's Nutrition Services. We are feeding both minds and bodies. We will continue our week with  Lego building challenges .

I am overwhelmed by the amount of support that our school has received from the community for our Young Scholars. In the past month we have received a grant from the Hillsboro Schools Foundation  and a 3 year promise of financial support from  First Tech Credit Union . These funds will help us with our  Project Lead the Way  implementation. We successfully piloted this program in grades 4th and Kindergarten this year. It is wonderful to know that all of our students will have access to this engaging hands-on, minds-on curriculum next year and for years to come. This curriculum is a major component of our journey as a  STEM Transformation School . We are so fortunate to have these community partners that believe in the success of our students. I look forward to sharing stories of our learning that is made possible by this generous support.

Project Lead the Way has expanded to Kindergarten. Our youngest scholars are learning about structure and function by building "beanstalks" and houses for the 3 Little Pigs. The Kindergarten teachers report that the students love building and creating. The first task was initially challenging because many of the students had little experience manipulating the materials. Watching our students struggle with just tinkering reinforces our belief that even our youngest students need engineering experiences. They were able to redesign their "beanstalks" once they had some modeling on how to work with the materials (pipe cleaners). They were very proud of their designs.

We completed our first module, Energy and Collisions of our Project Lead the Way, STEM curriculum. Students were engaged in hands-on, minds-on learning to solve a real world problem. The problem they needed to solve was how to protect a passenger in a vehicle collision. The passenger was an egg and the vehicle was made from VEX kits. Through a serious of activities and exploration, the students learned about potential and kinetic energy, elastic and inelastic collisions. It was some advanced physics for 4th grade. I learned along side my students.

2016 brings a new opportunity for me. I will be teaching my math class in our Chromebook Lab. My personal growth goal for this year is to integrate technology into my instruction everyday. See  My Goal This Year post . Having 1:1 access everyday will make this goal much easier. My math class was in the lab at least once a week this school year. I have used this time for independent practice using the programs  MobyMax  and  Prodigy . As students were working on these programs, I have been able to work with a small group on specific skills. I have used  Schoology  to create assignments and then my students submit their work using Google apps. I am excited about implementing more project based learning involving programming with my students. I believe my biggest challenge may be wanting to teach all of my classes in the lab.