Each Thursday on the EiE blog, we offer tips for teachers and answer your questions. 

Q. I'm a homeschool teacher and I can only afford the EiE Teacher Guide, not the Materials Kit. But I really want to teach EiE! Can I still use your curriculum?

A. Yes! EiE activities are designed to use easy-to-find, inexpensive materials. So it's easy (and inexpensive) to put together your own kit.

Every Thursday on the blog we bring you teaching tips or news about resources you can use in your classroom

Every Engineering is Elementary (EiE) unit starts with a storybook that sets the context for the hands-on engineering design challenge. You can show the pictures to your students the conventional way, by holding up the book for everyone to see . . . but you can also download storybook illustrations from our website and project them on a screen or SmartBoard. Beyond the convenience of this approach, storybook illustrations are a terrific teaching tool for English Language Arts, and especially for the English Language Learners in your class.

Every Thursday on the EiE Blog, we bring you helpful teaching tips and new resources for your engineering classroom.

Recently on the blog, we shared how EiE evaluators mapped our 20 elementary engineering curriculum units to state science standards and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). We’re not the only organization thinking about alignment to STEM standards. Achieve, a Washington, D.C.-based education non-profit that works with states to improve standards, has created its own “EQuiP" rubrics to measure how different curricula align to NGSS.

States that adopt NGSS will likely turn to tools such as the EQuiP rubrics as they make important decisions about STEM curriculum. With that in mind, our team has now assessed the EiE curriculum units using the EQuip rubrics. You can examine these rubrics on the “Connections to Standards” page of our website.

Q: My students are starting their second EiE unit. Do they have to work through the “What is Technology” activity again?

A: The answer is, “It depends!” All EiE units start with the prep lesson "Tech in a Bag" where students open “mystery bags” that contain different kinds of technologies. 

Examining low-tech items like socks and spoons helps students to expand their understanding of what the term "technology" means.

(WATCH THE "Tech in a Bag" VIDEO)

If you teach EiE, you can probably recite the five steps of the EiE Engineering Design Process (EDP) from memory: ASK – IMAGINE – PLAN – CREATE – IMPROVE!

In our professional development workshops, however, we notice that educators who are new to classroom engineering sometimes can’t picture what these steps will look like when their students actually DO them. That’s one reason we created EiE Video Snippets. These super-short videos (most are about a minute long) show you, quickly and easily, how young children work through the five EDP steps.