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!



  a Rafflecopter giveaway

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?