The students in my classroom are creative, enthusiastic and eager to learn. They love to move, love to read and love to be engaged. They come into the classroom each day excited to see me and excited to see what the day is going to teach them. In my classroom, I serve a variety of students and my goal is to provide them with creative and meaningful learning experiences. By doing this in a positive way, I am hopeful to instill a love of learning within each one of my students.
For elementary students, meaningful work should be hands-on, engaging, and open ended. Why?!
Because children have a natural drive to play, explore, and engineer whenever possible.
These STEM Bins will be filled with engineering manipulatives such as Legos, pattern blocks, base ten blocks, Unifix cubes, toothpicks and Play-Doh, or popsicle sticks with Velcro on the ends. The boxes will contain small sets of task cards that picture a variety of basic engineering structures. When regular classwork is complete, my students will be able to take a STEM Bin and get a quiet moment to engineer. They use the materials in the box to construct as many different structures on the cards as they can. And instead of being just “busy,” students are engaged in creative, complex tasks and are encouraged to think like inventors. Kinesthetic learners, spatial learners, and logical learners will love exploring the different possibilities for the building materials as they try to construct more challenging structures.