STEM Stories Lesson Plans

The STEM Stories project is a collaboration between Teachers College, PS 307, PS116 and the Castlebridge School and is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Through this NSF-funded project, we aim to support elementary school educators in developing students’ research and STEM skills, knowledge, and dispositions; to document, develop, and enhance elementary teachers’ curricular and instructional repertoires around STEM concepts; and to enhance and broaden parents’ understanding of STEM to include the diverse community contexts that the students in these schools call home.  

Research shows that STEM learning is activated when connected to the culture, context and histories of students’ lives. The STEM Stories Project seeks to activate this research by highlighting the connections between students of diverse racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds and developing practices to enrich STEM learning.

This website is a resource for teachers at our partner schools who want to implement STEM Stories lessons during the 2020-21 school year. Available lesson plans and downloadable student materials for each lesson can be found by navigating to the Fall 2020 Lessons tab. There are six lessons on that page that can be implemented as a sequence or as stand-alone lessons. Each lesson plan includes synchronous and asynchronous options for implementation as well as the relevant learning standards for the skills students will be learning or practicing during the lesson, and suggestions for differentiation.

Spanish-language translations of the student-facing documents for use with ELL students, in a Spanish-language classroom, and for distribution to Spanish-speaking families who are supporting students at home are available under the Translations page.