STEM Tales - A new bed for Golidlocks!

Fairy Tale STEM Activity - Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Try a hands-on STEM challenge with Goldilocks and the Three Bears! 

This STEM activity is designed for lower elementary kids. I am so excited to share some details about it! STEM tales introduce the youngest budding engineers to STEM, by taking a familiar story and using it to walk through the engineering design process. Do you love telling and re-telling stories with your kids? Do you ever change the ending to spice it up a bit? That's exactly what STEM tales is all about!

Integrate Literacy and STEM with Fairy Tales

The 8-page book provides an alternative ending to this story. Your students need to help make a bed for Goldilocks. Goldilocks is simply a printed out figure, which you can add weigh to with either small masses, pennies, or washers.

Using whatever crafting materials you have handy (index cards and tape are really all that is needed, but feel free to use other supplies as well), create a new bed for Goldilocks.

The Testing Phase of the STEM Challenge

Is the bed large enough? Will it hold the weight of the figure? You will be surprised at the designs your students come up with! Designing and creating a bed for Goldilocks is a way for students to bring the fairy tale alive.

After you have tested out the beds, it's time to introduce the bear family to the challenge (mama, papa, and baby, who is the same size as Goldilocks).

You will add heavier weights to mama and papa bear, and then test the designs again. This is a great way to demonstrate why it's important to know your design criteria before starting a STEM challenge! Mama bear may fit on some and not others, or papa bear may fit but weigh too much and collapse the bed.

 

Get the Goldilocks Fairy Tale STEM Challenge

Here is the link to the full resource. In addition to all the steps above, the 8-page story  book guides students through the engineering design process and also includes a self-evaluation check list.

 

Or pin the idea for later: 

 

How to Conduct a STEM Tale Challenge

To read more about how to conduct a STEM challenge, visit this post:

To see all posts in this series, click here:

Wordless Wednesday: early dinner

When you are too hungry and tired to go home and make dinner, so instead stop on the way home from class to have dinner at 3:30...and stack the crayons while waiting.

Studying U.S. States with Zoob

I can't take credit for this idea (that goes to my 7 year old), but I just love it so much I have to share it! We love hands-on learning at home, and I love that this is a fun way to look at some of the features of United States geography.

My son walked into the kitchen the other day holding up a shape he had made out of ZOOB pieces. "Hey Mom, doesn't this look like Nevada?" he said. We have been playing the game, the Scrambled States of America a lot lately, so it wasn't much of a surprise. I asked if I could take a photo of it with the card from the game:

Then I asked him if he thought we could make any other states. he suggested we start with an "easy" state, like Wyoming:

We then reshaped the loop of ZOOB pieces into many other states, and I took photos of several of them with their corresponding cards from the Scrambled States of America game:

Sorry this photo of Texas is blurry! My son realized he wouldn't be able to make the shape without adding more ZOOB pieces to the loop. This was some seriously fun hands-on geography learning that kept my son engaged for quite awhile!

The Scrambled States game is put out by Gamewright:

My 9 year old then had the idea of using the Scrambled States cards in a number of ways, so if you have the game you may want to have your kids do this too. You can order the states by geographic size by using the booklet that comes with the game. He also then had the idea of reordering the cards in the order they joined the union! At this point I'm pretty sure my kids know more about our states than I do!

ZOOB sets come in many different sizes and options. Look for them both at your local toy or learning store! They can be difficult to snap, and I would recommend them for children no younger than 6. My kids were happy building with LEGOs younger than they could easily work the ZOOB pieces, as they can be tricky to snap together. 

 
Have you used ZOOB in your homeschool or classroom, or do you have another fun way to learn about geography? You may also want to read about how we studied landforms and water forms using play dough:

A warm November, Halloween, and a brief homeschooling update!

We have been enjoying beautiful weather this fall! Today it is in the 70s (what? November?!) and we have been able to take advantage of it by taking lots of nature walks. We even got to do our STEM class outside today, woohoo! Here we are building and testing them out:

 

My kids had so much fun trick or treating this year. Here they are all dressed up:

This is the third year my eldest has been Darth Vader. Halloween costumes to be my kids' only low maintenance area! ^_^  My youngest made a Minecraft skeleton head and then he and I mad a bow and arrows together. We found some really cool glow in the dark tape to make the bones. Unfortunately I forgot to take a shot after it got dark out.

We continue to progress slowly through our studies though I am not feeling ambitious about homeschooling these days. I am reading a book aloud the kids seem to be enjoying, though I'm not sure they quite get the middle school flirting references quite yet at 9 and 7, they are finding the other parts quite humorous;

I have noticed that as we are focusing more on reading and writing at the moment, some math skills are slipping, so I'm thinking about getting 180 days of math for both my kids as review. There never seems to be enough time in the days to get through all of the things I want to do with the kids. Playing (imaginative, games, outdoor play) and our other activities (soccer, street hockey, swimming, music) eat a lot of our time. I know this is a common occurrence with homeschoolers, and that we are also attempting to tackle all kinds of subjects (like computer programming, engineering, and chess) that I never learned about as a kid. We have also been spending a lot of time outdoors and at museums, which I am okay with. This homeschooling journey can be tough, finding the balance of what needs to be done and what is okay to let go of in favor of other, more engaging, activities. Crossing my fingers these kids turn out okay in the end!

It's fall!

Fall in New England is an explosion of colors. I was worried this fall would be less colorful than in other years due to the lack of rain this summer. Boy was I wrong!

Happy Friday, everyone!

NEW site launch!

I am SO excited to share with you a brand new site I have just launched to focus on STEM! While I love blogging here about our homeschooling adventures and more, I really wanted to have a place just for STEM resources.

I have asked several other STEM educators to join me and hope the new site becomes a solid and helpful resource for parents, teachers, and students!

I will continue to blog here at momgineer about what we are doing at home, gardening, and other resources I find useful as we navigate homeschooling. Thank you so much for being a reader, and if you are interested in STEM activities, please visit the new site. If not, I hope to still see you over here at momgineer! 

Halloween Math!

Halloween is coming soon! I recently created a fun set of math activities that can be used near Halloween (and several of the pages have only monsters, so they can be used any time). There are two levels for each of the shown activities, plus several pages not pictured. Place value with monsters and base-10 blocks:

Roll and cover is always a fun game. There are options for 2 dice and 3 dice. Of course this might be more fun to use candy corn, but I have a feeling too many would disappear! Each resource shown on this page comes in color and black and white, so you can choose to make some reusable at your math centers instead and save ink and paper by only printing a few copies!

The measurement activity is the most challenging in this resource but both of my kids loved it anyway!

My second grader enjoyed reviewing these math concepts and gave these two thumbs up. This is not the look of pain, but of silliness after me pestering him with the camera for too long. Here is the link to the resource over at TpT:

Don't forget to also download my FREE Halloween math resource and glyph while you're here! Work on coin math and more:

Happy Halloween!