If I Built a School STEM Challenge
The following is a guest post from one of our STEM Teachers Club Members, Connie Ann Roussel, Literacy & Innovation, Randolph Elementary.
I am the librarian and STEM teacher at Randolph Elementary School’s Imaginarium. We are located on Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas.
Our program is a literacy based STEM class for Kindergarten through 5th grade students.
Class periods are forty-five minutes long and I see each class twice, every other week.
Our school serves military children who come to us from schools all over the world.
By starting a lesson with a story it gives students background knowledge that they may not already have.
Since our program began, we have tried a few different schedules for our specials rotation which my class is a part of. I prefer having classes on back to back days so that when we need more time for a challenge we are able to pick it right back up the next day. This also helps when we are building with materials that may fall apart after a week.
If I Built a School Challenge by Carly and Adam
When using stem lessons I find that some work perfectly the way they are written and some I need to adapt for the needs of our students and the age I am teaching.
Last year I used “If I Built a School” with our third graders and they really enjoyed it. However, when I was planning this year I thought this lesson would be a better fit for second grade.
The second grade team had asked for support with their community unit and I felt that building schools would be a good introduction before we built a whole community.
If I Built a School Challenge by Carly and Adam
When scheduling this lesson I gave classes two days to complete the challenge.
We reviewed vocabulary and completed our read aloud. Then we discussed how items are drawn on a blueprint.
I illustrated how we would draw our classroom if we were looking at it from in the room versus a bird’s eye view.
A great way to illustrate this is with doll house furniture. Using the lid of a copy paper box I placed the furniture in the space. I then traced the shape of each piece. When the furniture was removed and the shapes remained, it was easy to illustrate for students the correlation between the two views.
If I Built a School Challenge by Carly and Adam
Most students finished their room in one class period, but a few needed an additional day.
I paired this with the book “I Wanna New Room” by Karen Kaufman Orloff. I read the book during the second class period and explained to students that they would design their own tree house. While most students were ready to begin this new challenge, those who did not finish their room for the school were able to do that.
If I Built a School Challenge by Carly and Adam
Because I was engineering buildings with 5 different classes I decided to have each class make one building, instead of multiple small groups which we did last year.
I love working with straws because they are inexpensive and versatile but I am not a fan of the waste.
I used reusable straws and connectors for this and it worked great. Students came up one by one and built on to the school structure. I’m always amazed with what the students come up with and how some even thought of making outdoor spaces.
This challenge is a great example of one that can be modified for any grade level. To make this more challenging with older students you can add measurement and area calculations to incorporate math standards.
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Connie Ann Roussel is a mom to four daughters and wife to a retired soldier. She taught in New York and Germany before settling in Texas. Prior to teaching STEM she had 10 years of experience as a classroom teacher. She is currently the librarian and STEM teacher at Randolph Elementary School where she works with K-5 students.