Before the holiday break, students (and teachers) are often looking forward to a few well-earned days off. This means their attention spans are short and their energy is high! Keeping kids engaged and focused on learning during this time is no easy feat. Over the years, we’ve heard from educators that teaching fun, hands-on STEM activities in the weeks before holiday break is a great way to reinvigorate students, channel their pent-up energy, and encourage learning even when they’re itching for holiday festivities. We love providing our blog readers with timely classroom activities and helpful teaching tips, so here are a few quick and easy standalone STEM activities that will get your kids moving, learning, and focusing. And if you want to do some activities of your own before break, try out our Engineering IQ Quiz!

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at EiE to you! We hope you’re having a wonderful holiday. This has been a fantastic year for EiE, and we have a lot to be thankful for.

Sue Pietrusza has a mission: to keep the 63-year-old Christ the King Catholic School in Jacksonville, Florida “ever dynamically changing.” In 2014, the assistant principal and technology integration specialist set her sights on an exciting new goal—to get Christ the King School a STREAM (science, technology, religion, engineering, arts, and mathematics) certification from the Florida Catholic Conference. Three years later, they’re the first STREAM-certified school in the state of Florida! Sue says she’s already seen a positive change in her students and teachers, and that EiE helped them get there: “It was such a huge, integral part of us earning that accreditation,” she says. “I don’t think we would have ever been able to meet our engineering requirements without it.”

Our team is always looking for more ways to support elementary teachers. We listen closely to teachers, and we hear them express their need for financial support to underwrite the costs of professional development and materials. We are so pleased to have a partner in MathWorks, the Natick-based software company that is funding professional development opportunities for Massachusetts educators for the second year in a row. This year, the EiE/MathWorks scholarship program is bringing engineering to Haverhill Public Schools.

The EiE team creates every curriculum unit using extensive feedback from our closest collaborators: educators! Each unit undergoes multiple rounds of pilot testing to ensure that educators can implement engineering with ease and students can have a rich learning experience. Our quality control doesn’t stop at the educator guide—we make sure every pipe cleaner bends just right, and that our smiley-face erasers aren’t too distracting for preschoolers. We carefully select and test each material so that by the time an EiE kit arrives in an educator’s classroom, they can feel confident that it works! This fall, we’re piloting units from our preschool, kindergarten, and afterschool curricula, supplemental curriculum materials, and digital storybooks. EiE staff are assembling 81 pilot kits by hand to send to sites across the country. To give you an idea of just how many pom-poms and purple foam sheets that entails, we created an infographic breaking down what it takes to orchestrate a national EiE pilot.