STEM Club

100 points given if you can tell me what STEM stands for without Googling or looking it up. (Just kidding)

This summer I get to teach the STEM club through our school's 21st Century grant. Although, I don't feel like I'm "teaching" because the students are learning through hands-on projects. Okay, if you didn't figure out STEM by now: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. (Recently, I happened to see a teacher's blog that explained at her school they do STEAM because they add the A for art. Which I think is a perfect idea).

Here's what we've been working on:

Music videos

I have NO pictures of this but the kids LOVED taking a song, using pictures gathered from the Internet to compile a "music video." The principle loves the videos so much that he wants them put onto a CD to present for the parents at our school's Meet the Teacher night in August.

Bottle Rockets

Back in April, Dereck built this super easy bottle rocket launcher from http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/abe/soda-bottle-rocket.pdf . We used this launcher to blast off our 2 liter rockets. I would highly recommend to do this in the summer time if you have bored kids at home. Materials and supplies to build the launcher was only about $10 with about 30 minutes of time to make the launcher. Instead of using a bike pump, Dereck and I would just hook up our car jump starter that has a pump included (great investment for car emergencies). http://www.homedepot.com/BLACK-DECKER/h_d1/N-5yc1vZ2og/R-202072374/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053&langId=-1&storeId=10051

Sadly, I didn't take any pictures of us outside using the rocket launcher to launch the bottle rockets. They had impressive launches.

Learned about the history of Solar Power and how it works using SRP's eJourney (interactive virtual field trip)

Using the School iPads

This is what you get when a student was in Dereck's classroom and had AMPLE of opportunities to learn on the iPad. I learned about an app I was unfamiliar with. This picture is the cover page of a book the student created. I see a future journalist or published author!

Our most recent venture....

Creating a Marble Track from a specific list of allowed materials

I'm quite surprised! The neatest and orderly track was NOT built by the girls. It was the boys. The girls were STRUGGLING and yet the boys one hour less to work on their track, due to attending Soccer Club for the first two hours and join us for the last two hours of STEM Club.

Here's a video of one of the girls team track:

Tomorrow's adventure includes paper airplanes, learning about volcanoes so we can eventually build one, and designing a roller coaster using Discovery Kids.