STEM Implementation

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 how much the students would understand. She and her grade level partner were amazed at how much the students were able to learn and apply as they learned about genetics in 3rd grade! We are fortunate to have this engaging curriculum to help us with the "what" to teach as STEM teachers.

It has been inspirational to see how our staff has embraced this change. Teachers are looking for more ways to bring STEM ideas into their classrooms. It makes learning so much fun when teachers are excited about the content, too. When we started our year we made some agreements about being STEM educators. It is impressive to see these agreements in action as teachers step out of their comfort zone to try something new.

STEM Team Agreements made as a staff during in-service week.

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Ollies and Math

Thanks to generosity of Chevron through Donors Choose , my math class experienced a new mobile technology, Ollies! Ollies are programmable robots made by Sphero . We used the app, Macrolab to program the Ollies. I modified a lesson from the Sphero website to teach the concepts of measurement and data. The first day, we explored how to program the Ollies and how changing the variables in the program affected what Ollie did. The students recorded data to capture what they were seeing. On day 2 it was time to be more methodical with our data collection. Students only changed one variable at a time. This allowed students to discover the relationship between time and the distance that the Ollie traveled. The students changed the variable of the delay between the roll and stop commands to develop this understanding. There was definitely a lot of excitement and motivation to learn measurement. On Day 3, we analyzed the data recorded from each group. There were some noticeable differences

Roller Coasters

The students chose words to describe roller coasters. We recorded them using Answer Garden . I think it also describes what building roller coasters is like. There was a buzz of excitement as groups of students designed and constructed marble roller coasters. One of the student remarked, "This doesn't look like regular library time." He had just asked me if he could tape the roller coaster ramp to the wall and was shocked when I said, "Of course." The students were so engaged with their projects that they did not notice a visitor from the Hillsboro Tribune . Kathy Fuller came to learn about what was happening in our building this summer. We are proud that we will be featured in the newspaper. I will make sure to include the link in a future post. We will be continuing our roller coaster construction tomorrow. I am very thankful that our custodial staff is supportive of these messy projects. This video captures the feelings expressed in the wordl

Halfway

I am taking it as a positive sign that we are halfway through our summer program and there is still tons of positive energy. Mrs. Gonzalez and Ms. Ayala's phone calls resulted in 5 new students today! We are expecting even more new students on Monday. My hope is that we can bring the average daily attendance to 40 students. This article affirmed our purpose for the summer program and pushing the students to work on their math skills in addition to reading. http://www.vox.com/2014/7/13/5891583/summer-slide-achievement-gap-vacation I am looking forward to comparing their end of the year MobyMax math placement with their beginning of the year placement test score. Plans for next week... Model canoes, gardening, writing a Scratch character description and an art project

On the move

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