My preschool daughter loves Princess Sofia and her animal friends, so I try to tie in her stories to our learning moments whenever we get a chance. We watched an episode in which Sofia and a friend must design and build their own dream castle, and we read Chris van Dusen’s amusing book If I Built a House. Then, of course, we had to try designing a castle of our own dreams! Continue reading
One subject keeps my preschooler interested right now, and that is princesses. She loves Sofia the First. She loves the other Disney princesses. She loves ponies with long shimmering hair. She loves dressing like a princess and acting like a princess. If I can add princesses into school time, then I’ll get her attention. This week for Princess School, we did a Rapunzel engineering challenge as we built a block tower for Rapunzel to let down her hair from. Of course, then we needed to act out the story with our new scenery. Continue reading
This week’s STE(A)M project was building a bridge for an elephant (a little toy elephant). The kids had a blast working with cardstock and index cards. They were surprised at what they could do! We also learned some engineering vocabulary to go along with our project.
To go along with our Reading STEM project tree, the kids will get additional “STEM Bucks,” which is the currency of the classroom, when they read and report on a book. After we made our bridges in our STEAM class, I gave the students this list of the best bridges picture books (with building, engineering and architecture). Continue reading
My son has struggled with area and perimeter so we decided to make it hands on. I gave Raisin a challenge this morning: find the area and perimeter of his bedroom. Further, I asked him to build a bedroom model to go along with his answer.
Then, I gave him a measuring tape and graphing paper and told him he could use LEGO bricks if he wanted. He was delighted to get to work in making a bedroom model, and was especially excited once I mentioned LEGO bricks!
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