Steam Lab with Kinder

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

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!