More easy steps for amazing STEAM learning

Recently I began a blog post series about STEAM learning (STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) by looking at some ways to practice observing and recording data - 2 of the most basic science skills.  Today I want to continue with sorting, classifying, and labeling.

My students have always loved sorting / classifying.  Whether it's sorting building blocks by color, finding all the big buttons in my button box, or separating the mini erasers by shape, sorting seems to be a basic part of coming to understand their world.  Why not encourage it with fun materials, and add labels to those categories?!

It's easy to take sorting a step further with Venn Diagrams - which make us consider more than one sort-able attribute at a time. Do you see the red t-rex in this picture?  It isn't green, and doesn't walk on 4 legs, so the child asked me where it should go.  I helped him think it through - can it go in the green circle?  No.  Can it go in the 4 legs circle?  No. Is there a place on your sorting mat that isn't for green and isn't for 4 legs?  Children can do some amazing thinking!

Once children have begun categorizing things - not just sorting them, but also identifying how they've sorted them, it's a natural progression to count those things, and to compare what has more or less.  Graphs make it easy to compare several categories. (More on graphs next time!)

Children can also begin to label things they observe, from a single word for each item...

... to details as they develop vocabulary.

Don't you love teaching STEAM skills?!

Learning about Plants

Spring time is in full swing, with flowers blooming, trees budding, and insects humming - so it's a great time to learn about plants!

Ms. Debbie found an activity online that looked very promising,so I tried it at home over the weekend, to see if it would work for our preschoolers.

The website suggested submerging leaves in water, then waiting to see the bubbles of oxygen that the leaves produce.  What a cool idea!  I tried it out with 7 different leaves that I had on hand in the garden, to see which one(s) would best demonstrate the phenomena.  

I found that the herb leaves were too small to show it well, but large flat leaves were great!  After one hour I could see some bubbles, and after 2 hours there were a lot.

Debbie and I decided to set the demonstration up early in the morning before story time, so that by the time we were ready for hands on activities, there would be something to see.

I carefully set everything up, in 3 separate bowls, so lots of kiddos could see at the same time.

Unfortunately, with our tables being jostled by 90+ people in the room, any bubbles that formed soon were knocked free.  This would make a great activity to do at home, or with a small group, but didn't go as planned for our kiddos.  If you work with children though, you know this isn't the end of the story.  I'll come back to it shortly!

At the other end of one of the table I set up another awesome plant experience for our children.  There were large bean seeds that had been soaking for 2 days (I recommend 3 or even 4 days if you can), plus pea pods, seed diagrams, and magnifying glasses.  

The children were encouraged to carefully open the pea pods, and to pull apart the beans and peas to discover their various parts.  The seed coats on the beans came off fairly easily, and splitting the seeds revealed the embryonic plants waiting inside.  They kiddos were fascinated!

So how did that interact with the oxygen experiment going on further down the table?  Soup, of course!  If you have peas and beans and leaves and rocks and water, of course the children are going to create "soup"!  I didn't witness the process, but was delighted to find the result - because it is so very typical of this age group, and a resourceful young child found a way to turn my "dud" of an experiment into a developmentally appropriate experience.  The children are always teaching me new things!

The library has some amazing resources - available for check out! - including kits full of thematic learning ideas.  We pulled out all kinds of science materials to explore, including natural items....

...jigsaw puzzles...

 ... plant parts cards and leaf and seed samples to match to them...

 ... and plant parts rubber stamps, so the children would think about the various parts of plants (which we talked about during story time) as they "built" their own.

The rubber stamps were a huge hit, and a lot of our friends went home with green thumbs... and green fingers too!

Finally, to take advantage of the lovely spring weather, we had some seriously hands on activities outside!  There were soil and tiny cups for the children to plant a real bean seed to take home and water, and there was dirt to PLAY in!  

Dirt, plastic pots, trowels and some trimmed pieces of plants made for a delightful pretend!  While our young gardeners will have to wait at least a week to see their bean seeds sprout, this sensory bin satisfied their need for instant gratification, with a generous side helping of sunshine and dirt.

Sunshine and dirt, books and families... the recipe for a perfect spring day! 

Learning about insects

I don't know about where you live, but here in Texas, spring is just around the corner.  In the last 10 days our first daffodil has bloomed, and the trees are covered in leaf buds.  They aren't opening yet, but there is definitely a promise of spring in the garden.

Spring is best enjoyed outdoors, and it's a great time to learn about all the little critters that share our world with us. 

While some children are lucky enough to experience nature in a big way every day - I'm thinking farm or country life, or frequent nature walks - not everyone is. One kind of animal almost every child gets to see up close and personal is insects.  All those amazing things that creep, crawl, and all too often "bug" us!

I can't tell you how many times I've taken children to the zoo, only to have them all oo-ing and ah-ing over a beetle or a roly poly.  Sound familiar?  There's a couple of things that make all those little critters so appealing: they're tiny, and kids seem to love tiny things, they move, and that's pretty cool, and there are so many of them that you can almost always find one to check out!

Sometimes it's best not to touch.  I never could identify this particular caterpillar (if you know what it is, I'd love you to leave a comment!), but I try to have the children leave hairy, spiky caterpillars alone. 

I try to teach my kiddos to be safe, without being scared.  Bees are scary to a lot of children, whether because they've been stung, heard about stings, or because their family members are afraid.  Instead of teaching the children to fear them, I like to talk about how to be safe around them.  I teach the children that bees are attracted to bright colors - like flowers.  If our clothes are brightly colored, a bee may want to investigate us, even land on us.  But as soon as they realize we aren't sugary sweet like a flower, they'll fly off.

It's amazing to see the relief on children's faces when they realize that bees aren't out to get them!  We also talk about how a bee's stinger is part of her body, and that she dies if she stings something.  If we aren't a threat - batting at her or bothering her, then she most likely won't bother us either.

 If you have a garden area, even a small one, you probably get lots of insect visitors that you can observe.  Try giving children a pencil and a notepad and encouraging them to draw what they see. 

 Check out the aphids on our cabbage plants!  (Yes, it really is cabbage.  I let them go to flower, and then we watch the insects come, and we also like to nibble on the tasty cabbage flowers ourselves - although not if they're covered in aphids!)

It's no surprise to find ladybugs crawling on the cabbage, and we often find ladybug pupa too!

 We also learn about insects a lot of other places.  With books, of course, but also on field trips.  We saw "Critter Man" at one of our local libraries over the summer, and he had some SERIOUS insects to show us!

 This looks like a bee, but it isn't.  On a trip to the Botanic Gardens one of the children pointed out the "big bee" by the flowers.  I was able to snap a few shots, and upon closer inspection realized it was a moth.  Cool!

I've blogged before about seeing the butterfly exhibit at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, but I'll mention it again anyway.  If there is an opportunity for you to walk through a live butterfly exhibit, I hope you will - unless your children are scared of them.  Last year I took 3 different groups of children to the exhibit, and the first 2 groups LOVED it.  There were 2 kiddos in the last group who didn't like bugs getting too close to them, and it didn't matter that they were harmless and beautiful.  I should have prepared those kiddos better for our trip, or let them skip it.  20 years of teaching, and yes, there is definitely still more for me to learn!

 Can you see the butterfly on the left using its proboscis to suck up sweet juice from the fruit?  How cool is that?!

If you don't have a garden area, and you can't get to an exhibit, you might consider raising butterflies.  I've had a lot of luck with painted lady butterflies, which I've ordered from Insect Lore before.  There are other companies too, that's just the one I've used.  The first time I raised butterflies I had them in a cardboard box enclosure with plastic side windows.  Please, please, don't use that!  It wasn't big enough for the butterflies to fly in, so they'd launch from one side, crash into the windows, and unable to hold onto the slick plastic, slip to the floor.  They were able to climb up the corners, between plastic  sheets.  Sad!  After that I made a wire frame that fit inside a large plastic bin, and added a fine mesh cover.

 Our butterflies only stayed in it a few days before we released them, and it was a much better arrangement!

I've bragged about Bella's book club at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas before too.  Check out the fun insect learning activities we enjoyed at one of their story times.  If you are in or near Fort Worth, I highly recommend joining them!

Of course there are times when you need to take the learning inside, and if you are a teacher, there are times you need paper and pencil activities too.  

 If you are interested in insect themed arts and crafts, please check out my Insect board on Pinterest,

there are so many people with so many amazing ideas!

I've put many of my best insect photographs into a fun sentence-picture matching activity.  (It is $3.50 to buy from my TeachersPayTeachers store).

I used a lot of preprimer and primer words, and designed the activity for student success.  I tried it out with a former student, and as you can see from the look on her face, she was ecstatic  to discover she could really read all the sentences.  If you're working on early reading, or you have a junior entomologist on your hands, I hope you'll check it out!

If you'd like to see all my insect themed resources, just click here!

Have an awesome spring!

Potatoes - a follow up

  If you've been following my blog, you might recall that the kiddos and I planted potatoes in the spring.  I read a fantastic children's book, Two Old Potatoes and Me, and we planted old potatoes just like the father and daughter in the story.  You can see the previous posts about it here.

 It's fall now, and the plants had stopped growing, and looked pretty tired.  I decided it was time to dig into the soil around the potato plants, and to see what we might have grown.

 The first thing we all noticed when I dumped out the big bin full of soil and potato plants, was that there were hundreds of worms in the soil.  Big worms, little worms, middle sized worms... lots and lots of happy earth worms.  The children couldn't keep out of it, and happily dug in, searching for potatoes, and thrilled to find the wiggly worms.

 Our "haul" was pretty pitiful.  Only one of our potato plants had any potatoes, and they were very small.  We ended up with just over a handful of new potatoes.  I probably dug them up too soon, but even so, we had very few potatoes.

You are probably thinking that growing the potatoes was a waste of time - if you judge solely by the final yield, that would be true.  So how else could this activity have been of value?

The children spent a lot of time learning about potatoes, literacy, plant growth, and nature.  We read
almost every week, all summer and into the fall.  We learned what color is "periwinkle," and noticed that the child in the book has two homes, one with dad and one with mom.  For children whose home experience is similar, it's very affirming to find characters they can relate to.

The kiddos learned that potatoes have eyes, and that they can grow from them.  We saw some of the pieces of potato rot or get eaten, and then watched as the surviving plants grew.  The children added soil to the pot, burying the base of the plants frequently to encourage potato growth.  They even looked for potato beetles regularly!  They may not ever do it again, but the kiddos know how to grow their own food, and that's a powerful piece of knowledge!

When the children found worms this year, they put them into the soil around the potatoes, and watched as the worms dug down into the soil.  Obviously those worms survived and thrived, evidenced by the massive crop of worms we found. I dumped the soil and potato plants into the vegetable garden for us to dig through, so the worms and the soil is now nourishing the garden, ready for another crop.  We also learned that worms are not boys and girls, but hermaphrodites - they are both male and female! 

So no, this crop of potatoes is not going to go very far. I'm going to make mashed potatoes with them, but will have to supplement with store bought potatoes to make enough for us all to enjoy.  Still, I'm happy with the return on the investment:  we grew some children, right along with the potatoes!