STEM Integration Work
The subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) are embedded at Baler Primary School by all classes utilising a cross-curricular approach and often incorporate English and the Arts learning areas as well. Teachers do this by creating project based learning tasks that provide opportunities to foster critical and creative thinking skills in real life scenarios, thereby exploring STEM learning areas and concepts. The combination of these subjects deepens students’ understanding and often creates palpable enthusiasm for the project work they are engaged in.
Kindergarten
In collaboration with our Talk for Writing program, our Term One STEM project was to build our very own home using natural resources collected from our gardens. We went on a nature walk around the school to collect our building materials. We sorted our collection and classified them into groups. Using our collection, we designed our homes and worked together to create our masterpieces.
We had so much fun building our home among the gumtrees.
Pre Primary
The Little Red Hen’s STEM Adventure
Our STEM project for Term Three was to help tell the story of The Little Red Hen using BeeBots. We started our project by receiving a special delivery from a secret friend filled with ingredients to make bread. We went through the whole process of making bread and realised how difficult it was and that having friends to help made it easier. We then completed lots of different activities looking at the story of The Little Red Hen. As we had been learning about coding and using BeeBots we decided to turn a BeeBot into the Little Red Hen. We used our coding skills to help her get from the beginning of the story to the end where she was able to eat the bread she had made all on her own! What an amazing adventure!
Year Two
In Talk for Writing, we have integrated our Poetry unit “The Day the Zoo Escaped” with our STEM project. We decided to build a Lego-Maze for our animals to escape from the zoo and into the Wild.
The students had discussions on how the animals would escape, questions were formed and some great suggestions and ideas were generated. The students discussed, where the animals needed to go? How they would travel? By ocean or air? Did they have go to the airport? It was very interesting.
The students then decided on the buildings they would create for their little Lego city and at the end they had to decide whether they were going to build an airport or a Port.
Year Three
In Semester One the Year Three classes designed, made and appraised cages they made to keep a dragon. Please click on the hyperlinked title below for the complete project including photos of their clever cages.
Year Four
Throughout the Semester the Year 4 cohort studied Africa and Europe. As part of their learning, students were required to design a zoo enclosure to meet the needs of an African animal. To integrate our learning with STEM, we held a ‘Project Day’ at the end of our unit. Students had to design their enclosure and construct it using a range of recyclable materials. We discussed the importance of creating environments that replicated their home environment in Africa. The students were very creative in their designs!
Year Five
For Year 5 HaSS, we have been looking at the continents of North and South America. So, we linked our Book Week window displays to Native Americans, by making our own Dream Catchers. Our Dream Catchers were designed to show images that, while “Dreaming with our eyes open”, are inspiration for our lives and our creative writing. We used paper plates, with wool, beads, buttons and images sourced from the internet. We think they are amazing.
Year Six
Resources Challenge: Automation!
Year 6’s were lucky enough to take part in Grok Learning’s automation project. In this course the students programmed small robots, explored how mining uses big robots, and learnt why robots are useful to the world.
Microbits (which are tiny computers) were programmed to work through problems found in real life mining!
The microbits were then added to a microcar so they could navigate a series of steps on a map. As they worked through the challenge, the programming became more sophisticated and very tricky! This was a great program which all the students enjoyed.
