Is improving your teaching practice one of your New Year's resolutions? The EiE professional development team can help you with that! They're offering two free webinars to kick off 2018: on January 10, "Getting Started with EiE: Materials Management" and on January 24, "Integrating ELA & Engineering in the Elementary Classroom." In these sessions, you'll learn from the experts as you study classroom footage, get tips you can apply in your own classroom, and more! Read on to learn more about these interactive, one-hour sessions and register today.

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!

The engineering design process is central to engineering. Engineers use the engineering design process to create technologies. For our elementary engineering curriculum, we developed an age-appropriate five-step engineering design process: Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create, and Improve. Did you know you can apply this problem-solving tool to problems outside of engineering? Throughout the school day, your students encounter numerous problems that they’ll need to solve. Our engineering design process can give your students a process to solve their everyday problems more effectively and a chance to practice important 21st century skills like collaboration, communication and critical thinking. Over the years, educators have shared with us the innovative ways they adapted EiE’s five-step Engineering Design Process (EDP) to the help their students solve a problem. Below we share our favorite examples!

How much do you know about engineering? Think you can spot common misconceptions about the field of engineering? 

Imagine this scenario. You’re doing an Engineering Adventures activity with the kids in your afterschool program. They’ve been working hard designing and testing . . . only to discover that their technology doesn’t work as planned. When that bubble wand doesn’t produce any bubbles, or the toy car made from a soda bottle doesn’t roll, don’t despair: this is a teachable moment.

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.