STEM Activities for the First Week of School

STEM Class Activities for the First Week of School

If you want to get to know a little more about your students, and get them started to think like scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, I have some great ideas for you!

Get to Know You Activities for STEM Class

Get to know your new STEM students with an All About Me activity! The Math About Me and Science About Me activities are perfect for this. With multiple options, depending on what grade you teach, there is something for everyone. These activities have your students think about things in a slightly different way.

For example, in the Math About Me activity, their age can be displayed as a mathematical expression (such as 48÷4), while in the Science About Me activity, the banner asks students to write down how many solar orbits they have taken (their age).

Collaborative Activities and Team Builders

ABC STEM Game: Try to think of a "STEM word" for each letter of the alphabet as a class. You might start with "astronaut, architect, or ASK (the first step of the Engineering Design Process).

Find Your Pair or Find Your Team: Use sets of colored straws, pencils, colored dice, or mini erasers. Pass out one to each student and then have them find the other student(s) with the same color/type of object. You can also use pairing cards such as these. This is great for when you want to build STEM teams, too!

Find all my favorite STEM Team Builders and Icebreakers in this post:

STEM Lab Rules and Expectations

It's important to go over safety rules for all equipment, your specific rules to your classroom, and then to set expectations for students. You may have some you start with and you may want to ask your students to help come up with some basic ones too.

Some ideas for STEM rules and expectations:

Only operate equipment you've been trained to use. safety
Report accidents right away. safety
Clean up your workspace when you are finished. responsibility
Listen to your teammates. It's okay to disagree but not be disrespectful. cooperation
Sometimes you will fail and that's okay! Do your best and try again. growth mindset
If you don't know, ask. curiosity

What other rules and expectations do you use in your class?

You may want to have a specific set of rules for things like robots, too! I created a free set of robot rules you can download below:

Need a safety poster for your glue guns? This editable resource is available to download here:

STEM Building Challenges

Try some basic building challenges with your students so they can get a feel for hands-on activities right away! You can download Tower Task Card Challenges from my free resource library:

You can also find STEM challenge cards to use with KEVA planks in this blog post:

STEM Books to Read

What better way to start off your school year than with books that inspire creativity and explore failure and growth mindset! Find all my recommendations over at this blog post: