This November, the EiE staff decided to take a quick break from daydreaming about mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie to brainstorm new units that would have young engineers designing revolutionary Thanksgiving technologies. Unfortunately, these engineering challenges weren’t quite ready for the prime time. We might need to stop brainstorming holiday ideas cold turkey! We hope you’ll get a kick out of these failed Thanksgiving units.

We love hearing from teachers who integrated the arts into their STEM instruction. STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) activities can enrich student learning by providing learners with different ways to engage with STEM concepts. To support educators who want to incorporate the arts into their STEM instruction, we’ve highlighted a few of our favorite examples below.

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.”

Recently, EiE team members attended our very own Museum of Science’s Dream Big Educators’ Night. Alongside 200 educators, we watched the Museum’s new IMAX film Dream Big: Engineering Our World, an amazing testament to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of engineers. Dream Big is a great example of how engineering stories that situate STEM learning in a real-world context help students understand the significance of the STEM concepts that they learn in the classroom. We were so inspired by Dream Big that we compiled a list of video resources that feature engineers who are working to achieve the incredible. Visit the Museum to watch Dream Big in person and/or show your students these clips to spark their imagination and get them excited about engineering a bigger and better future!

When you’re getting ready to teach an Engineering is Elementary lesson—or when you’re in the middle of a lesson that extends over more than one class period—you have lots things to organize. 

Patty Whitehouse is the Engineering Lab teacher at Chicago Public Schools' Goudy Technology Academy, which means she does more organizing than most teachers. Every student in the first through fourth grades comes through her lab once a week—almost 400 students total. The school uses two or three different Engineering is Elementary units in each grade, so Patty often preps five different Engineering is Elementary lessons each day! Here’s how she stays organized: