It is hard to believe that we are half way through the 2015-16 school year. My enthusiasm for teaching is energized thanks in part to my Kenan experience. Getting a chance to work with my students on STEM activities has been inspiring for me as a teacher and the kids are so excited on STEM days. I am committed to teaching project based learning I just love giving kids the opportunity to show what they know based on their multiple intelligence.
Learning through STEM, has been an amazing way to teach my students. I am amazed at how easy it has been to integrate my curriculum with interesting STEM lessons. My student teacher taught a great lesson teaching kids about resources and tolerance. She read a book about how everyone has different resources in their lives, some kids have more money than others. The kids were then told they were going be doing a STEM activity. They were tasked to build the tallest tower and each group got a bag of supplies. Some got very few supplies while other groups got lots of useful items to build their tower. It didn’t take very long at all before the kids started noticing that not all the groups got the same resources. It was brilliant lesson on helping them see that we need to be compassionate and aware of the difficulties some of their classmates deal with having fewer resources. It was brilliant. Helping kids collaborate with each other has been another effect of my wonderful Kenan experience. Really diving into the 4C’s, communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking has been the most significant change that has happened in my teaching this year. In fact, I no longer ask the students to talk in a quiet voice but rather to speak in a corporate voice, I described my observation of being in the offices at UL, which is a sea of cubicles, and the engineers were still able to conduct meetings and have important collaborations in a soft voice.
Through these various STEM activities we have really been able to discuss a variety of jobs and career paths. I look forward to the day when I ask to kids to write about what they want to be when they grow up, they did this activity at the beginning of the year and I anticipate many new career choices when they repeat the activity at the end of the year. This has been such a great experience for me and my students.