ST 1.3

Students are empowered to personalize and self-direct their STEM learning experiences supported by STEM educators who facilitate their learning.

Self-Directed Learners

At Munford Elementary School, we are focused on taking the fear out of failure for students. Often students learn more from their mistakes than they do from their accomplishments. The Engineering Design Process, which emphasizes reflection and redesign, guides students and allows them to consider many possibilities without fear of failure. Our students have become self-directed learners because of their teachers becoming facilitators of lessons that allow students to take ownership of their own learning. Students set academic and personal goals and track their progress towards those goals in their leadership notebooks. At the end of each nine weeks, students' successes are celebrated at a school leadership celebration for their work towards accomplishing their goals. The leadership celebrations are planned, organized, and led by the students!

Technology as a Tool for Learning

At Munford Elementary School, student learning is enhanced in a variety of ways through web-based programs and apps such as IXL, Moby Max, SeeSaw, Epic!, and Code.org. Activities are designed to stretch student learning while scaffolding instructional sequences which create space for failure in a safe and secure environment. Many of the programs provide instruction at the student's level and increase in difficulty as the student becomes more proficient with skills. Students also use technology as an opportunity to stretch their thinking and curiosity by creating things they otherwise would not be able to create.

Technology + Teacher Support

Our teachers provide support for students as self-directed learners. Many regularly use Google Classroom, Remind, Nearpod, SeeSaw, and Pear Deck, which are digital platforms that provide students with organized and ongoing accessibility to course materials. Teachers are accessible to students and parents through email, chat, or a variety of apps, thus enabling them to provide extra learning opportunities, feedback, and remediation to individual students. All teachers are required to post weekly lesson plans in a Google Classroom and create a newsletter that informs parents of weekly content focus areas and upcoming assignments and assessments.

Choosing Creativity

In kindergarten, students are allowed to choose stations and STEAM bins where they create and construct structures based on their creativity and imagination. In some instances, students are given a task, but other times they have freedom of choice in their creation. When students complete their construction, they use Seesaw to communicate and share what they’ve created, how they did it, and why they chose to do things that way.

Making Meaning

In first grade, students were engaged in using the Engineering Design Process to create obstacle courses and create moving devices to build trees. In a math unit on shapes, students selected various pattern blocks to create a design using a limited number of materials. Students also problem solved ways to manipulate shapes to create pictures and designs in order to work with a set number of materials.

Innovating Ideas

In second grade, each student group designed a bed for Goldilocks in reading. Also, during Houses students designed a catapult to throw an item the longest distance. In science, students used Stem Career Adventures to simulate working as a chemist for a toy company in order to design slime that kids can play with.

Investigating Inventions

After reading about inventors and their inventions on ReadWorks, groups of third grade students collaborated using the Engineering Design Process to create new inventions. Students had to come up with an idea together and agree on an invention that would solve every day problems. Students planned their design and decided which materials would be needed. They researched items and determined a good price for their invention. Students then went to other groups and presented their invention and then asked how they could improve. They were able to get ideas from two other groups about improvements they could make. Each group then discussed if the ideas they were given would make the invention better or worse.

Designing with Division

In fifth grade, students incorporated STEAM into math with the division house project. The students used division problems to create their own houses. Students were instructed to work division problems, check their work, and draw the items (e.g. trees, apples, windows, flowers, bricks, etc.) accordingly. After students completed their houses, they could revisit their work and improve their designs.

Division House Planning

Division House Collaborating

Solar Eclipse 2017

Solar Eclipse 2017 was definitely a day to study both inside and outside of the classroom.

During the Solar Eclipse of 2017, students were engaged in various explorations of the Sun. This included a Solar Eclipse viewing party (accompanied by safety glasses).

During their self-directed learning on Solar Eclipse Day, students chose what aspects of the sun they wanted to research and then created Google Slides to share their research and their experience with the solar eclipse.

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