Why not start off the new year with a Teachers Pay Teachers Giveaway?   As we get rested and ready to hit the ground running in January, a $25 gift card would help you get off to a great start.

The wonderful people at TPT gave me 2 $25 gift cards to giveaway to my followers!  No strings attached, just fill out the form below.

Good luck!



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Can you build a paper chair that can hold the weight of a stuffed animal?  This STEM challenge is always one of my students' favorites!  There is a lot of opportunity for variety in this challenge depending on whether you restrict the supplies and/or the size(s) of the stuffed animals.

For our version of the challenge, students were restricted to only 12 inches of masking tape and 2 sheets of copy paper.  This restriction in supplies provided an added challenge for my students.  In past years, I had students bring in their own stuffed animals and then use tape and paper to build a chair to hold their stuffed animal.  Either way works great!

Here are some of our solutions:

 

These little stuffed animals were from Amazon.  They were really inexpensive.  Students who were successful in the challenge got to keep an animal as an added bonus.  This challenge was a lot of fun!

Click here to purchase this challenge pack for just $2!

Connecting picture books and STEM seems so natural in an elementary classroom, but I know it can also be successfully done in even middle and high school classrooms.  Each quarter, we send home a STEM Challenge Project and this is one of the students' favorites!  Here are some of their projects!

We based this set of STEM projects on the book, What Can You Do With a Box?,  by Jane Yolen.

Students got a 6 x 6 x 6 cardboard box, which you can buy in bulk on Amazon (you can get 25 of them for $6.95)!  

If you want detailed directions and lab sheets, you can buy this STEM pack in my TpT store!  Click here for the link.

These look great displayed in the hallway or classroom!  Our students were so proud of their creations and they loved giving a short presentation to their classmates about their box project!

What can you do with a cardboard box?

Who doesn't dream of breaking a world record?  This new STEM pack will give your students a chance to do just that!

As we were reading the novel, Masters of Disaster, by Gary Paulsen, we worked on learning more about world records since the main characters try to break them in the book (with hilarious results).

This was one of the simplest, but also the most challenging!

Out of six groups, only two were successful this time.  Students got straws and a limited amount of tape.  They learned a lot about design during this challenge.  You do not have to be successful in a STEM challenge in order to learn a lot!

We learned that you need a wide base in order to support the weight of the tower as it grows in height.  

Want to break a real world record?  Try this one!  You can find the straws/connectors on Amazon!

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I was offered a free subscription for Flocabulary. My students LOVE it! It is a site that I will continue to use in my classroom for many years to come. It is well worth the cost of the subscription, in my opinion.

The best part? How excited my students are when we log in.

What is Flocabulary?

• Flocabulary is a web-based learning program for all grades and subjects that uses educational hip-hop music to engage students and increase achievement.
• Teachers in more than 60,000 schools have used Flocabulary’s standards-based videos, instructional activities and formative assessments to develop core literacy skills and supplement instruction across the curriculum.
• Flocabulary offers more than 750 instructional units to support instruction in math, science, social studies, ELA, vocabulary, current events and life skills, with new content every week.
• We offer a deep instructional sequence that teaches standards-aligned skills and content while helping students develop literacy skills across the academic curriculum. We support teachers in all content areas teach and assess reading and writing skills through the recently-released instructional tools we offer like Read & Respond and Lyric Lab.
• Engagement has long been the “bread and butter” of Flocabulary—our roots are in catchy and accurate educational hip-hop videos. Flocabulary’s videos create authentic engagement, our complementary instructional tools provide new opportunities for learning, and our rhyme writing tool, Lyric Lab, empowers students to get the creative juices flowing with their own educational raps.

One of our favorites is the Food Chain song. I cannot even count how many times we have played it, but my whole class pretty much knows it by heart, AND they refer back to the lyrics in science class. not only does the site have these great videos and songs, it has great worksheets to go with them!

Flocabulary is giving away three subscriptions for each blogger!  You can enter this giveaway by clicking here!   Hurry...you must enter by October 16th at 11:59pm ET.   Winners will be drawn October 18th!  Good luck!

We are reading the book, Masters of Disaster, by Gary Paulsen in our classroom.  In the book, the three characters are trying to break a world record.  They have epic fails, but never give up.  It is a great book for upper elementary and it really gets kids excited about reading because the book is absolutely hysterical!

I created a set of STEM challenges based on real world records and then we tried to do them!  One of the challenges was to create the strongest pasta bridge with a span of at least 15 inches.  Students got 4 feet of masking tape and one box of spaghetti noodles.  Some groups were successful, and some were not, but students learned a lot and had a lot of fun!  They also got more experience working together to complete a task.

Our strongest pasta bridge actually held seven pounds of weight!  As you can see from the pictures, groups had some very different ways of completing the challenge.  I always love to see their creativity!  Click here for the link to this STEm pack.

We also used our STEM Reference Sheets for Bridges when doing this challenge.  The reference sheets help students troubleshoot and come up with ideas for a specific topic.  Click here to purchase the reference sheet.  I laminated the two pages of the reference sheet back to back on colored paper.  We can then access them whenever we do a STEm challenge with bridges!

I always like to start the school year with 2 specific STEM Challenges.  The first STEM Challenge we do is Tiny Glasses.  Students have to build the tallest structure using 48 tiny glasses in only 20 minutes.

This is the first challenge I like to do for a few reasons.  First, it is a challenge that no one is very good at the first few times they try it.  Students have to be able to not give up in order to be successful and the time limit makes them even more likely to think it is impossible.  We always have a great discussion once the challenge is over about growth mindset and the importance of continued trying, even in the midst of utter failure.

The second challenge we complete is the Puzzle Building Challenge.  This challenge requires students to build a 24-60 piece puzzle together without the picture on the box.  As if that wasn't challenging enough, students have to do it without talking to one another.  They can use hand gestures, but no actually talking.

This challenge shows the students the value of communication during a STEM challenge.  They also come up with really clever ways to communicate with one another without words, which always seems to strengthen the team.

Which STEM challenges do you like to begin the year with?  Please share your ideas in the comments!

I am so excited about our first school-wide monthly STEM challenge!  This one requires very few materials!  All you need is a pack of assorted balloons from the Dollar Tree and a roll of masking tape (also from the Dollar Tree).  Each month, I also add a book or two and I love these two!

Stay tuned for pictures of our balloon towers once school starts!  Click here to purchase this monthly STEM challenge pack!

Here are some of our finished balloon towers!

Our tallest free-standing balloon tower was 64 inches tall.  We used a pack of 25 assorted balloons per group!

Did you know you can make your own microscope slides?  It is really easy!

All you need is:

- plastic microscope slides
- clear nail polish
- assorted items (salt, glitter, sugar, leaf, penny, bead, etc.)
   {or anything else you want to put on a microscope slide}

Steps:

1. Place a pool of clear nail polish on the center of the slide.

2, Place the item onto the clear nail polish.

3. Let dry.

4. Examine under a microscope.

You can place one item on each end of the microscope slide to save space.  Try placing comparable items together, like salt and sugar crystals - salt on one end and sugar on the other.  You can label each slide's contents with a fine sharpie marker!

Super easy and the kids have a blast!  You can store slides in a plastic school box so students can examine items more than once!

I love framing quotes and subway art in my classroom!  I always looks great hanging up in the classroom, or even in the hallway.  There are two versions in the pack!

Click here for a FREE Subway Art Pack for STEM!

Looking for a colorful way to display STEM, STEAM, or STREAM information in your classroom?

Just mount these onto a bulletin board or white board and add related information, research, data, etc. for each letter in the acronym!  The file can also be modified to work as STEM, STEAM, or STREAM!

Get your students thinking and talking about STEM, STEAM, or STREAM!

Click here for the link for this pack!  For $3 you get the posters as well as some interactive notebook pages and even a notebook cover design!

Looking for a way to get your building involved in STEM?  You don't have to be a "STEM" school to do STEM!  STEM teaching and learning really benefits ALL students.  Through STEM based lessons, students learn skills in collaboration, cooperation, communication, and perseverance, just to name a few!

The first step is getting teachers to TRY it!  STEM can be a little scary, especially to elementary teachers who are often uncomfortable in the areas of science and technology.  An easy way to get teachers to try it, is to give each one a pool noodle.  Yes, a pool noodle!  These are easy to find and really cheap during the summer (especially in August).

Teachers simply need to cut up the pool noodle into various sizes and shapes (use a kitchen knife) and as students to build the tallest free-standing tower using all of the cut pieces.  The supplies are easy to find and QUIET when they crash (which they inevitably do at least once).  

 Here are a few examples of the towers student groups built using pool noodles.  One of the best parts of STEM challenges is that there is no "right" way to do things.  Many different ideas will work!

If you really get into using pool noodles, you may want to check out my pool noodle challenge pack. It contains five different STEM challenges using pool noodles and other, easy to find supplies.  The 

Five Challenges Included in this Pool Noodle Challenge Set:

Pool Noodle Race Track Challenge
Pool Noodle Shooter Challenge
Pool Noodle Rocket Challenge
Pool Noodle Structure Challenge
Pool Noodle Sculpture Challenge

Start out with an easy to prep and complete STEM challenge and teachers will hopefully get a little out of their own comfort zones in order to let their students try STEM!

Stay tuned for more ways to get STEM going in your school!

Hi there!  I am a 4th and 5th grade teacher with 25 years of experience in urban public schools.  I have taught in five different buildings and I have been lucky enough to work with many different student populations.  I spent seven years in a self-contained gifted classroom and I am currently working at a STEM K-5 school.  As the STEM Coordinator at my building, I have developed many different monthly school-wide challenges, STEM breaks and engineering challenges for my own building.  Elementary teachers are often more comfortable with themes and literature, so many of my challenge packs are organized around themes and literature.

I am always looking for ways to connect with other teachers who are exploring and experimenting with STEM in their own classrooms.  STEM can be so overwhelming and challenging at first, but the amazing ways the kids respond to STEM will make you want to keep trying things.  My own students are so much better at collaboration, communication and risk taking thanks to STEM activities.

My newest collection is called Stories and STEM!  It is a great way to get kids reading and connecting their reading with STEM engineering challenges.  Stay tuned to my TPT store for more of these packs as I add them!

I am also a wife and mom to three amazing kids, an 11th grader, a 9th grader and a 4th grader.  They keep me pretty busy, too!  Stay tuned for more posts!  Comment or email me with any questions or comments!