Heritage Academy students demonstrate STEM content knowledge at each grade level in preparation for the next level of learning and work by integrating the Georgia Standards of Excellence in all subject areas into the PBLs that are implemented. The over arching task that the students are required to complete as a result of the PBL are designed to demonstrate that the students have mastered the grade level content. Although our PBLs focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, Reading and English Language Arts are an integral part of students mastering the content presented in our PBL units.

The SCIENCE standards utilized from the state standards scaffold from grade level to grade level. For example, our kindergarten students begin exploring plants by grouping them according to their physical features. In each grade level, students add to their knowledge of plants. By the time students matriculate into fifth grade, they are at the point where they can identify plant cells and how the parts of the cells enable it to survive.

Our school-wide TECHNOLOGY integration has improved tenfold over the past five years. We have gone from classroom carts that have had to be shared based on the day of the week, to now all students have one to one technology access every day of the school year. This technological access has increased students ability to utilize technology in a variety of ways to solve real world problems through participation in PBLs. All students in grades pre-kindergarten and kindergarten have access to iPads. Chromebooks that are assigned to individual students in first through fifth grades for the school year. Utilizing technology, students have been able to create and present their own infographics, public service announcements, commercials and structural designs, just to name a few of the advantages that students use of technology has provided in PBL implementation.

The ENGINEERING Design Process guides everything we want to accomplish in terms of students mastering grade level standards and STEM competencies through PBL implementation. We began this process several years ago through STEM Challenges that pushed students level of thinking to complete an engineering task but could be accomplished in 1 to 2 science class periods. Building upon the scope of these challenges led us to where we are today; implementation of three to four, six week PBL Units in which standards from all subjects are integrated and students use their mastery of each grade level to excel at the next.

For MATHEMATICS , we have chosen the Eureka curriculum which builds year upon year on students conceptual knowledge of basic mathematics skills and processes. Our PBL units are designed to include the use of knowledge/skills gained from the Math curriculum in a practical real world application. Measurement and graphing are usually a part of the PBL tasks. Students start with non standard measurement in the lower grades and throughout their years at Heritage Academy move to standard forms of measurement, metric and standard conversions. Students move from identifying different types of graphs to actually creating their own pictographs, bar graphs, and line plots to communicate information about the PBL task that they have created.