To date, 42 states and the District of Columbia have adopted Common Core State Standards for Math. What does that mean in the classroom? Students still have to learn to add, subtract, measure, and make bar graphs. They're also expected to develop a deep understanding of math concepts and be able to apply math outside the classroom.
Hands-on engineering is ideal for putting math in a real-world context, and Engineering is Elementary's Linking the E & M in STEM (LEMSTEM) professional development workshop is packed with creative strategies for bringing meaningful math and engineering integration to the elementary classroom.
Designed for all educators—including those without engineering or math teaching experience—you’ll come away from the two-day workshop understanding how to:
- Identify activities that provide meaningful math and engineering integration
- Collaboratively plan your own integration activities
- Transfer your learning to the classroom
- And more!
There’s still time to register for the upcoming workshop on November 2-3, 2017 at the Museum of Science, Boston. Registration is $300 per educator.
What IS a LEMSTEM?
When you attend a LEMSTEM workshop, you'll get hands-on experience as you learn about math extension lessons that go beyond the activities already in the EiE Teacher Guide. There are math lessons embedded in every EiE unit. The August LEMSTEM workshop will guide you through the entirety of To Get to the Other Side: Designing Bridges—our civil engineering unit. The math practices embedded throughout this unit include:
- Making sense of problems and persevering in solving them
- Reasoning abstractly and quantitatively
- Constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others
- Modeling with mathematics
- Using appropriate tools strategically
- Attending to precision
You’ll leave the workshop with handy resources, like an integration table that lays out how the activities in certain EiE lessons map to Common Core Math Clusters, Practices, and Standards. Our integration tables also include more extension lessons to enhance math learning. Here's one example: When students build bridges of their own design, they record the number of items used to build their bridge (for example, 12 index cards, 4 soda straws). Challenge them to improve their designs while using fewer materials than the first design. You'll also learn how to confidently navigate the hundreds of free resources on our website, including extension lessons to help you integrate math and ELA.
Our next Linking the E and M and STEM workshop takes place on November 2-3, 2017. Registration is open now—reserve your spot today!
