STEAM Activities: Holiday Edition

Greetings fellow educators!
This year, I've been focusing on my science and social studies integration activities much more closely.  I'm having a great time creating meaningful lessons for my littles.

Last week, we did our Holiday themed STEAM rotations.  I was so excited about doing them, I drafted my neighbor, Erin and her students into my experiments!  We split our classes into six groups.  A few from my class and a few from hers.  We had a handful of parent volunteers, so we jumped into the stations as well.  The kids rotated to each station after about 15 minutes.

It was SO MUCH FUN!

Any of the experiments we did can be done in class as a demonstration.  It would still be fun!

Full disclosure:  Erin and I weren't sure which experiment the kids would select as the one for our science fair board, so, we prepped each one like we were going to use it for the fair!

For each experiment we included:

An Essential Question

A Problem

A Recording or Reflection Sheet

Each of the stations had some type of elf/ Rudolph/ or Santa type reference so that the kids could make better connections.  They LOVED that! :)

One of our 'problems' was that the elves had to get a bag of oranges to a family of fish that lived at the bottom of a deep lake.  The fish could not swim to the surface, and the elves could not swim to the bottom.  How to get the oranges to the bottom???

First, we engaged the students' senses.  Asking them to touch and smell the oranges.  Then we let them look at the inside of the orange and taste part of it. We talked about where oranges grow, their scientific name, and the names of the parts of the orange as well.  The students predicted whether just putting the orange in the water would work, and then they drew that on their reflection sheet.

The orange floated on the first trial.  We discussed WHY it floated and had the students offer their own ideas.  In the cases where students didn't have a guess, we were able to tell them that the rind has air pockets that help the orange stay afloat.

After some discussion, we allowed the students to peel off the rind and attempt the experiment again.

Voila!

Success!

The orange sank like a stone!

Without it's air-filled rind, the orange was more dense than the liquid around it, and it sank to the bottom.  The students were surprised!

Another super fun activity we did was this map skills activity with three digit addition!

This was a fun activity to create...and even more fun to walk through with my kids!

I made up these pieces for a different three digit addition unit, and added a post office for this.

This is really like a huge logic puzzle...and the kids really surprised me with how well they did!  I can't wait to make up something else like this for them to try again!

I told them that Rudolph needed a schedule for his activities in the week before Christmas.

The students were to come up with the schedule as a team but there were some rules that had to be followed.  For example, Rudolph was only allowed to make three trips a day. Or...only on Tuesdays and Thursdays could Rudolph get reindeer snacks at the bakery. After working together with them on the first day, I assigned each student a task and told them I would help them if they needed it. 

Probably, the most popular job was surveyor, because they got to walk on the map!

This was a super popular activity with the students and I plan to use it again, just on a smaller scale when we come back!  They really impressed me with their ability!

Our school has a group of teachers that make up a STEAM committee.  I'm the rep for my grade level this year.  One of the challenges I was given by the facilitator, was to come up with some more engineering style projects for the kids to try out.  Just give them a problem and some tools and see how things work out.

For this activity, the students were told that they had to use the box to simulate a sleigh.

Santa had left some candy canes in the sleigh.

They could have them, if they could get them, with NO HANDS.

The kids had yarn, dowels and some extra candy canes.  There were some pretty ingenious ways to go about the task!

To continue to work with number sense, I had my students create necklaces with 'beads' that had numerical value.  Some beads were a dollar, others two, and an additional type was three.  They had to come up with a pattern, make the necklace less than $40 and use at least 20 beads.  There was lots of counting going on and some pretty snazzy necklaces were created!

Santa won't have to worry!

My elves won't break the budget!

I put a few other experiments in there as well.

They were all super fun and my kids had a ball doing them!

Stay tuned for my science fair board reveal sometime after Christmas!

You won't believe what we did!

So much fun! :)