O' Christmas Tree Challenge

This week in Steam lab, 2nd grade is learning the history of the Christmas Tree. Did you know the first tree was brought over by German Settlers in the early 1800's? My 2nd graders love learning about how the White House chooses the Blue Room tree.

After learning the history of the tree, each group forms a plan to build a Christmas tree out of newspaper, tape and weighted ornaments. I used plastic ornaments from the Dollar Tree and hot glue washers to add weight. Students are given 20 minutes to build a stable tree.

Over the course of a week, I will complete this challenge with 9 different 2nd grade classes, ranging from GT to inclusion. Below are pictures of completed projects. If you are interested in this challenge; check out my product on Teacher Pay Teacher.

TPT O' Christmas Tree

Steam Lab with Kinder

This week Kindergarten is working hard to build a chimney for Santa. We are reading the story Santa's Stuck by Rhonda Gowler Greene. After the story, we discuss the problem in the story, which leads to our Steam challenge. I walk the students through the Engineer design process (Yes, I even do it in Kinder!) and challenge the students to design and build a chimney for Santa.
This is kindergarten's first time using masking tape and open supplies, where previous challenges everything was given to them. I demonstrated how to tape popsicle sticks together to form a box and left an example for them. Normally I would not give students hints on how to complete a challenge, but learned my lesson the hard way and found out it's best to walk them through the first challenge. I will say for future challenges, I will not give them hints. The student were given 25 minutes to work in small groups to complete the challenge!

This is one of my student's favorite challenges, my  students still ask if they can complete this challenge again!

Completed chimney

They decided to go in a different direction.

Kindergarten's designs (I love the Santa!)

I found the plushies at Dollar Tree!

Santa's Stuck by Rhonda Gowler Greene

TPT Product December Steam Challenges 

Welcome

Thank you for visiting Inspiring Creativity with Moreno.

I am so excited to start my blogging journey. This is my 3rd year as a gifted and talented teacher and running a school wide STEAM lab! When I started my current position, it was part of a new district initiative to implement STEM in all grade levels. My role was created to run a Steam lab for the entire K-2 school ( around 21 classrooms) and service the K-2 Gifted and Talented students. At the time, I only had ten 1st & 2nd grade GT students. There really was not a curriculum for gifted and talent and the Steam lab was brand new. To say I felt like a fish out of water, is an understatement. I remember going through hundreds of blogs to figure out how a Steam lab should work. I never really could figure out what would work for our campus, as most were designed for older elementary aged students. With trial and error, I finally figured out what would work. I have learned to step back and let the students figure out what does not work on their own. Fast forward 3 years and I currently have 40 GT students and our school population has grown to 27 classrooms.

How Steam lab works:
I rotate through grade levels weekly. I start with 2nd grade and work my way down. My first year, I completed the same challenge with each grade level, but changed up the building materials. Quickly I learned that teaching the same lesson 21 times for three weeks straight got old FAST! Now I do completely different challenges each week depending on the grade level. Check out my STEAM page to see updates on how my challenges work and see what we are working on weekly.

How Gifted and Talented groups work:
I currently and working with my 1st and 2nd grade students and push in the Kindergarten classes doing screening lessons. I will test Kindergarten in January to qualify for our Gifted program. My 1st and 2nd graders are pulled twice a week for 45 minutes. I try to keep my groups to 5-8 students per group. I have three 2nd grade groups and three 1st grade groups. Check out my G/T page to see what we are up to in class!