Middle School STEAM Collaboration in 2020

The STEAM Lab was designed to teach students 21st Century Skills including collaboration.  What does collaboration look like in 2020 when students can not sit at the same desk or work on the same materials?  How can projects be adjusted to facilitate students learning to work together under these conditions?

This week students in Grade7 demonstrated how they could use technology to collaborate on a Media Literacy project.  

Students were paired together for this project.  Each group of students used a ZOOM breakout room to discussed their project as they worked.

They used Google Slides to collaborate on the documentation of their work.  

The results of their collaborations were fake Instagram posts based on comical pictures.  Each group had to create two posts - one that could be evaluated as credible and one that had the indications of a fake news story.

What posts would you create?

The Kindness Pets' First Adventure

The Kindness Pet's house is complete.  Our solution to creating a house for our pets involved paper-maching a plastic pumpkin to create a round home.  We then mod podged and hot glued a straw hat on top.  The house was spray painted brown and a LEGO door was attached.  When the house was complete we realized that the door was too high so we designed and created stairs from sticks.  Problem solved!

I think the pets are happy in their house.  They challenged us today to start spreading kindness.  We made simple homemade granola bars (recipe below) and cut flowers from our yard.  We delivered this cheer to our great aunt.

How can you be challenged to share kindness today?

Homemade Granola Bars

Ingredients:

3/4 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup honey

2 1/4  to 2 1/2 cups quick oats

Mix peanut butter and honey together in a microwave safe bowl.  

Microwave for 10 seconds.  Stir.

Add oats. Stir until all oats are coated with peanut butter.

Press into a 8x8 square dish and place in the refrigerator to cool.

When cooled, use a pizza cutter to cut into bar shapes.

You can add your favorite "extras" with the oats . 

You could try mini chocolate chips, raisins or diced dates.

Adjust the amount of oats accordingly.

The Kindness Elves are Coming to the Remote "Lab"

I was recently inspired by an article about The Kindness Elves and decided to incorporate a version in my "Remote Summer STEAM Lab" (aka my dining room).  The Kindness Elves were originally designed as an alternative to the Elf of the Shelf.  Instead of the elves appearing every morning in mischievous ways, the elves appear each morning with a note about an act of kindness for children to do. Check out the website in the image above to find out more about The Kindness Elves.

The original Kindness Elves are dressed for winter so our STEAM Challenge today was to create summertime elf alternatives and to create a home for them in the remote Lab.

I found three possible alternatives for elves around my house.

With input from my sons, I decided the lab should have "Kindness Pets".

The next step was to create a house for them.  

Inspired by the picture above, I gathered supplies from around my house.

Check back next week to see the finished project,

and to find out more about the challenges the Kindness Pets leave in the lab.

If this inspires you to create Kindness Elves or Kindness Pets on your own, 

I would love to see pictures of them.

The Adventure Begins

It is the first day of the first full week of summer vacation.

This summer will be an adventure of discovery.  

And what does every adventurer or explorer need?  

An Adventure Journal

You can make your own Adventure Journal.

You will need:

A copybook

A printed picture of an old map

A glue stick

A copy of the Adventure Journal Label

To make the journal cut the map to cover the front of the copybook.  

Glue it to the copybook.

Then cut the journal label to a size you like and glue that on top.

That is all there is to it!

This journal was made from a copybook that had been repurposed.  The copybook had originally been used in school this year 

but had plenty of blank pages left in it.   

Summer STEAM

Today is Memorial Day.  

It is the unofficial start of summer.

So what better day to start this Summer STEAM blog.

I have created an Early Childhood Summer STEAM Calendar of activities.

Click here to check out the activities for June.

Additional activities will be added to the calendar throughout the summer.  I will also use this blog to show examples of the activities and provide more details.

In the coming week I will also be posting activities for Lower School and Middle School.

Subscribe to get emails when new material is posted. 

Math Art STEAM Activities

Looking for a STEAM activity to do?

I recently found a great site called What Do We Do All Day?

It has ALL kinds of activities for kids from toddlers to teens.

My favorite are the Math Art activities.  
In these activities children (and adults) can create artistic pieces using math concepts.

One activity is called Pi Skyline.
For this activity you only need graph paper and something with which to color.  Kids graph the digits of pi in order to create the skyline.  This is also a great counting and graphing activity for kids too young to understand pi.

Another Math Art activity for older kids is Spirolaterals.

Pi Skyline with Spirolateral (4) Sun

Still need more STEAM activities?  
Try these other websites and activities.

Left Brain Craft Brain

How to Make a DaVinci Bridge

Emoji Traupes

Red Ted Art
Origami Boomerang
Paper Helicopters

Raising DaVinci (Youtube Channel)
10 Candy Science Experiments
10 Easy Rainbow Science Activities

Rube Goldberg Contraption Challenge

A Great Way to Spend Spring Break

The Middle School students had a great time designing and building a Rube Goldberg contraption last year so when I saw this challenge I thought it would be perfect to pass along to our families.  

Rube Goldberg was an engineer who became a cartoonist and his cartoons often included complicated contraptions to do simple tasks.

Self Operating Napkin Contraption

The contraptions used every day items found around the house making them perfect for this Spring Break.

The link in the graphic above does not work.  Here is the video.

You can find more videos at Rube Tube. 

You can also build virtual contraptions with the Rube Works App.

If you build a contraption (to enter or just for fun) please email me a picture or a video.  I would love to see them.  Have fun!