Anyone, even young children, can be engineers. With EiE^®’s Wee Engineer and EiE for Kindergarten units, you can foster young learners’ creativity and put them on a problem solving path before they reach elementary school.

Young learners are natural engineers, ready to innovate and eager to explore the world around them. Extending our curricula offerings to the youngest learners and creating an engineering design process for the preschool classroom seemed like a natural next step for EiE. Our newest curricula, Wee Engineer and EiE for Kindergarten, are picking up press  With our recent feature in T.H.E. Journal, we were reminded how much we couldn’t have created our newest offerings without our closest collaborators: educators! Every EiE unit undergoes multiple rounds of pilot testing to ensure that educators can implement engineering with ease. Our pilot educators teach in a variety of settings and have varying levels of experience with engineering. With their feedback and guidance, we’ve learned so much about how to design hands-on engineering activities for preschoolers and kindergartners. Hear from these passionate educators, download free sample lessons from Wee Engineer and EiE for Kindergarten, and create a generation of problem solvers.

Hands-on engineering activities empower young children to see themselves as problem solvers. They learn that there’s more than one way to solve a problem, and that it’s okay to fail and try again. A classroom-tested engineering design challenge with an age-appropriate engineering design process will provide fun and engaging opportunities for the youngest learners. We found in creating our early childhood curricula that engineering activities should look different in preschool in comparison to kindergarten. Learn about those differences below and why age-appropriate engineering activities are so important.

Before creating our preschool curriculum Wee Engineer, we knew that it was important to answer these questions, "Why engineer with preschoolers?" and “How will engineering support early childhood development?” Preschoolers make a lot of things, and our challenge was to channel this natural inclination of children into an engineering activity that would align with the skills they’re already developing. We conducted hours of research, consulted with many early childhood educators, and tested our activities in various early childhood settings with the goal of answering the above question.

Through this work, we identified several ways in which engineering is beneficial to young children as they develop skills in these important learning domains: social-emotional, language acquisition, executive functioning, and fine and gross motor skills. 

Reading to young children sets them up to succeed in more ways than one! Stories are powerful tools that can help young children build empathy, develop language skills, discover the world around them, and learn more about the concepts they’ll learn later on in their schooling. That’s why we’re always on the lookout for great STEM books to read with young learners (3-5). These age-appropriate STEM storybooks will help make STEM accessible to them and spark an early interest in these subjects.