On the move

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.