STEM: Making the abstract tangible

Selwyn House Grade 5 students have recently been working on a series of STEM projects, activities that teach them about science, technology, engineering and math. In recent years, STEM-related courses have come to the forefront throughout the world in curricula from preschool to university level.

 

At Selwyn House, STEM in Grade 5 is a weekly bilingual class taught by Grade 5 teachers Stephanie Lafortune and Ashley Waggoner. “All the lessons in this module are hands-on and project-based, and all aspects of the lessons involve problem solving,” Miss Waggoner explains.

 

Lessons include:

 

° Building toilet paper models of the solar system to teach how to plot numbers on a line and scale them by multiples of ten. During this lesson the boys also used the school’s virtual reality (VR) headset to explore the structure of the solar system.

 

° Baking brownies to teach measurement and fractions;

 

° Creating a robot obstacle course to build and program toy robots and how to measure and classify angles (e.g. right, obtuse, acute);

 

° Building catapults, which teaches students about simple machines and how to solve basic engineering problems;

 

° Taking part in a Quick Response (QR) code scavenger hunt, where pupils search around the school for hidden QR codes that launch graphing-based questions on their iPads;

 

° Geocaching, or digital orienteering, where students search the community via Global Positioning System (GPS) to find hidden messages;

 

° Building models of the phases of the moon using Oreo cookies;

 

° Growing a garden, which teaches students how to take measurements of planting areas, and teaches them basic biology as they learn about the life cycle of plants.

 

“The main reason we do STEM projects is that they allow the boys to tackle problems in their own creative ways,” says Miss Waggoner. “It is important for us to immerse the boys in situations that require problem-solving skills instead of just having them read about problems and hypothesize about what they could do. It allows us to take things that are usually theoretical and put the boys in the driver’s seat, where they create solutions to real-life problems. We take the curriculum out of the abstract and make it tangible.”