The Common Core State Standards for math are pushing elementary educators to re-think how to teach math. How do you go beyond skills like adding and subtracting or the times tables to help kids develop a deep understanding of math concepts? Engineering activities are an ideal framework for meeting this challenge. 

So you’re teaching engineering to your elementary students. And today they’re designing a technology—perhaps a solar oven or a water filter. One group comes up with an unusually

What can you say when a windmill doesn’t work?

creative design . . . but it doesn’t quite work as expected. Now what?

For maximum learning impact, you want to be ready with prompts that help your students do their own problem solving. In other words, you need effective questioning strategies! You can learn more about these strategies when you attend a new interactive online learning session from Engineering is Elementary, scheduled for October 13, 2016.

Kids have been engineering hand pollinators at Barkley Bridge since 2007!

Last year, the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) selected the Engineering is Elementary curriculum as part an ambitious program to improve STEM education statewide. So now many Alabama elementary teachers are getting their first exposure to classroom engineering. But for Wendy Goss and John Mark at Barkley Bridge Elementary in Hartselle, AL, engineering is nothing new: They’ve been teaching EiE for almost 10 years. (We don’t know for sure, but we think this may be a record!)

Teachers tell us that their students sometimes get so inspired by an engineering design challenge, they want to do MORE than the lessons call for. This is a good problem to have! Here’s a plan to extend STEM learning when you teach Liftoff: Engineering Rockets and Rovers, a popular unit from Engineering Adventures, the EiE curriculum for elementary out-of-school time programs.  

Burke Swenson (r) in his Iowa STEM lab.

When Iowa STEM instructor Burke Swenson breaks out the Engineering is Elementary unit Catching the Wind: Designing Windmills, he has no trouble making connections between the engineering design challenge his middle school students are about to tackle and their real-life experiences. “The state of Iowa has more wind turbines per capita than anywhere else,” he says. “Go down the interstate an hour, and you’re at a wind farm.”