Yesterday was an exciting day. After months of work, the STEM Lab hosted its first lesson. My 6th graders are studying waves, and the teachers requested a hands on lesson for that topic. After much searching, I had collected a variety of ways to incorporate hands-on into our study of waves, and I finally settled on making a jelly baby wave machine. I discovered this great activity on the National STEM Centre website, and was immediately hooked. I modified and tweaked it a bit, and eventually put together a full lesson that included some video, a lot of discussion and hands-on, and also some assessment, distributed via Google Classroom.
Getting ready to try out our wave machine.
We had a full house for the lab. In addition to myself, the two classroom teachers, and all the students, my principal was there to do my observation, and our curriculum supervisor and our superintendent both showed up to watch. My students were AMAZING. They were so excited to be the first to use the lab, and to get hands on with our lesson. Our discussions went far more in depth than I was expecting, and they were actively using vocabulary terms which until then had just been random words on paper. They were extremely engaged, and very eager to do whatever I asked of them. It was great to see them expanding their knowledge and beginning to direct their own learning. I can’t wait to do it again!
