I LOVE STEM Education! As a previous K-6 teacher, I specialize in STEM and I have been anxious to begin introducing Fitzgerald to learning some STEM skills. One thing I have found out in my work with young children and STEM is that they can accomplish SO much more than you might think!
Our first week’s STEM challenge was inspired by a preschool curriculum I bought from the preschool curriculum from The Busy Toddler. I found her FANTASTIC Preschool curriculum last year, “Playing Preschool”. However, our plans changed (thank you, pregnancy sickness!) and I wasn’t able to do much of the program with him then. But now we are doing some homeschool preschool this summer with all of our extra time at home!
The theme this week is the letter “R” and all the colors of the Rainbow. Since Fitzgerald loves spying rainbows in the sky and loves talking about our rainbow baby, of course we needed to make rainbows together! *See below for a FREE printable with the step-by-step for this STEM challenge.
My goals with STEM at this young age are simple:
- Identify attributes of an object
- Select appropriate materials
- Practice manipulating materials to achieve a goal
Materials:
Any colorful objects you have! We used: paint, markers, pom-poms, pipe cleaners, clay, and colored construction paper.
Procedure:
First discuss what a rainbow looks like and present a couple of different images of a rainbow. Then use the questions below (based on the goals identified above) to guide your child in finding different ways to use the materials to make a rainbow!
For this challenge, my questions for him look like this:
- What does a rainbow look like? i.e. curved lines and naming all the specific colors in the rainbow. This is a good time to introduce vocabulary like “arch”.
- What materials do we have that we could use to recreate a rainbow?
- How can we move or use the materials to create a rainbow? How many different kinds of rainbows can you make?
Let your little engineer explore and come up with their own solutions, with you stepping in to guide as needed! Fitz is just about 4 and I found that he needed just a little help coming up with some ideas, but he could also do some on his own. He really wanted to use the Play-Dough to build and it was fun watching him problem solve for a bit before he realized how he could transform each color into an arch!!
Click the image below for the FREE printable!
Happy building!
<3 Emily
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