STEM, Team Building, and FUN!

Last week our dynamic third grade teaching team, Mrs. Savage and Mrs. Long teamed up to make their lessons come alive with STEM. Just in case you aren’t familiar with that acronym it stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. Combining these disciplines together is proven to fully engage the student, help them make connections between disciplines, and have fun too!

These particular STEM activities were chosen to help students get to know each other and to practice working as a team. Each of the challenges was designed to help develop critical thinking skills and to help students realize that everyone’s input has value. Mrs. Savage said, “We hope they will learn that they can depend on each other and that true teamwork can bring about the best of solutions. Teamwork and problem solving skills are attributes that every student needs to be successful in school and beyond.”

In the STEM challenge shown below, Mrs. Long explained, “students had to work as a team to build a tower of cups without using their hands. Each child got a piece of string and a rubber band and had to figure out how to use these materials to grab each cup and stack it by working together with the strings to make the rubber band grab the cup and then release it onto the tower.”