A total of 42 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics and English Language Arts. An engaging and effective way to meet these standards is through classroom engineering—and Engineering is Elementary offers convenient CCSS Alignment Guides to help you make the connections.

When Camie Walker chose an Engineering Adventures activity for her fifth-grade classroom two years ago, she was thinking about how the lessons would complement her plans for English Language Arts instruction. She never expected that the real-world engineering design challenge would help her students become more resilient in the face of failure . . . or move them to meaningful social action on behalf of a young boy left destitute by a natural disaster.

When we wrote the storybook Omar’s Time to Shine, the story of a boy named Omar in Egypt who designs a lighting system for his school play, we never could have imagined that it would find its way into the hands of a volunteer who leads STEAM activities in Park City, Utah’s historic Egyptian Theatre. You might call that kind of alignment “serendipitous.” Wendi Laurence certainly does! When Wendi attended an EiE Teacher Educator Institute and found the Lighten Up unit, she immediately knew that it would be a blockbuster success in the Egyptian Theatre’s YouTheatre STEAM program. Of course, the story begins a little earlier than that—with an idea and a napkin!

EiE storybook characters are diverse by design. There are 20 different protagonists, all from different backgrounds, races, family situations, and abilities, and it’s for one good reason: students feel inspired when they read stories about someone they can identify with.

This intentional diversity was a plus for Claudine Conover, a PreK-5 science teacher at a small school in the Bronx, as she searched for STEM lessons that would resonate with her students.

We’ve told you about how EiE meets the needs of many student populations, like English Learners and students with diverse needs, but there’s one population benefitting from EiE that may surprise you: students in gifted and talented (GT) programs. This week at the National Association for Gifted Children’s 2016 conference, EiE’s Chris San Antonio-Tunis presented his preliminary research about EiE’s impact on GT populations to a standing-room-only crowd. He shared a few reasons why real teachers from around the country love using EiE in their gifted and talented classrooms.