As the hustle and bustle of another school year comes to an end, students and teachers are looking forward to a summer of fun. Students and their families are planning vacations and fun-filled days at the pool. Teachers are also planning to enjoy the summer break while preparing for an invigorating new school year. As an educator for over 15 years, I love summer breaks as a time to relax and rejuvenate my passion for teaching. I find ways to relax and explore my hobbies through travel and volunteering. I also look for ways to enhance the learning in my classroom.
A couple of years ago I began volunteering at Padre Island National Seashore in south Texas with the Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle Nesting Project. This sparked so much excitement in me to share the experience with my incoming students—as well as my campus—that I created related lessons and a presentation I gave at my school's career day. The experience also inspired me to engage my students in the sciences through virtual field trips. My summer experiences have driven me to seek out more opportunities to develop Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) activities in my classroom.
Preparing to STEAM Through a New School Year
STEAM education incorporates creative thinking (art) into science, technology, engineering, and math by focusing on problem-solving scenarios. STEAM uses hands-on learning to facilitate student questions and growth, and participating in STEAM-related activities will grow students' understanding of how things work, which supports analytical thinking, and develop their use of technology (Bybee, 2010). This summer, I began developing my STEAM toolbox. One webpage that intrigued me, STEM Resources, discusses and provides resources on how to get started with STEAM in the classroom (Edutopia, 2016). Some ideas that I am exploring this summer are STEAM bins and Makerspaces.
STEAM Bins
I had heard about STEAM bins through coworkers and love the idea of offering classroom activities that incorporate problem-solving strategies and collaboration. STEAM bins can contain items found from nature, craft supplies, or household items like paper towel rolls or old technology parts—similar to the raw materials that stock makerspaces. There are many ways to create STEAM bins—teachers can collect odds and ends for students to create items from their imagination, or provide tasks that students must complete, using the items inside the bin as the resource materials to solve a problem. There are even people like Brooke Brown of Teach Outside the Box who offer pre-made bins, such as this one. You can find even more options by simply typing the phrase "STEAM Bins" into the search option on Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT). STEAM bins allow young students to explore problems and solutions, and can be easily adapted for older students. For example, a writing element can be added into the STEAM building process as a way for students to show their planning and then to reflect upon their learning. As students begin to create, they can write out a plan of action so that they can see where they want to start and what the finished project will be. Students can then write about what went well or what they could have done differently. Younger students could reflect through pictures and labels to demonstrate their understanding.
Makerspaces in Literacy Stations
Literacy stations, which are small group rotations where students work collaboratively on literacy skills, have been part of my classroom routine for the past several years. When I began these stations, I used only lessons and ideas based on the literacy skill for the week. My stations have evolved to include interdisciplinary content from social studies and science, in addition to the literacy stations. For the upcoming school year, I plan on including a makerspace aspect to the social studies and science stations so that my students will be able to apply the concepts that they are learning to real-life problems.
Students will be given a task or scenario—each week—that relates to the lessons taught in science and social studies. They will then work as a group to create a plan to solve the problem, determine materials needed, implement the plan, and reflect on what did or did not work. For example, if we are studying various forms of transportation in social studies, students could be tasked with creating a new form of transportation for the future. If we are studying water conservation in science, students could use the makerspace to design a way to collect runoff water for a town in need of a water supply. Providing spaces for students to create responses or solutions to the problems we study helps them build lasting connections to the concepts they are learning.
I'm also planning to connect my maker spaces/stations with technology tools that will help my students reflect upon their learning. With the app ReCap, teachers can post video questions or tasks asking students to explain their design process and/or developing understanding as they work on an assignment. Students could also use this app to demonstrate understanding by teaching other student groups about their creation and how it solves a problem. Adding a reflection component to these stations will help students see where they made mistakes, how they can improve, and what they did right. Reflection provides the students the opportunity to own their learning, which makes it meaningful to them (November, 2012).
Building the Problem Solvers of Tomorrow
Incorporating STEAM education into the classroom can grow a student's 21st century skills through investigation, collaboration, and diverse learning projects (Bybee, 2010). International assessments, which rank the U.S. 24th in science literacy and 28th in math literacy among 15-year-old students, show that this is an area of need for our students (Kuenzi, 2008). As the new school year approaches, I will be gathering my supplies and building my STEAM toolbox to guide my students in developing the 21st century skills that will serve them throughout their lives.