You'll find helpful tips for teachers every Thursday on the EiE blog.

Each Engineering is Elementary curriculum unit integrates with the science you already teach . . . starting with a storybook. For example, if your elementary students are learning about plants or insects, they'll read a storybook with an agricultural engineering theme, about a young girl who wants the exotic plant in her garden to bloom and makes a device for pollinating it by hand.

There's a good reason to start with stories: they provide an age-appropriate context for the engineering activities that follow. But you don’t have to stop with the “official” EiE storybooks. We have another terrific set of resources to support literacy instruction and reading in your classroom. Check out our Literacy Resources lists—there’s one for each of the 20 EiE units.

Each Thursday on the EiE Blog, we share helpful tips for teachers.

Do you teach the unit “A Stick in the Mud: Evaluating a Landscape”? Here’s a tip from one of our professional development collaborators, Laura Keeling of Tully Elementary in Louisville, Kentucky. 

As the school’s Learning Lab STEM teacher, Laura sometimes works on the same EiE lesson with several groups of students in a single day. She shares a simple way to cut prep time for one activity in half—AND use fewer resources.