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STEAM and the Project Approach
Over the past several years, the Early Learning Center program directors and educators have invested in professional learning and practice geared toward mastering the foundations and implementation of The Project Approach with young children from infancy to kindergarten.
It wasn’t until this school year, however, that we began exploring direct connections between our ongoing projects and foundations of STEAM learning in early childhood education. These ties are obvious and may even seem redundant, however, as the prevalence of STEAM increases in the wider educational sphere, outlining these connections offers teachers a pathway to introduce research-based STEAM practices with our youngest learners through projects meaningful to them.
Most of these practices are already embedded into the fabric of the early childhood classroom. So, the work lies in making these elements visible to teachers, children, and families - to bring attention to the sophisticated nature of children’s work.
STEAM Learning Simplified
The following descriptions of STEAM principles as they occur with young children are borrowed from Hedda Sharapan’s article From STEM to STEAM: How early childhood educators can apply Fred Roger’s approach. In this article, Sharapan demystifies complicated STEAM terminology in a way that increases understanding for teachers interested in deepening children’s learning through a multi-dimensional, intercurricular approach.
Science is encouraging investigation, experimentation, curiosity, and natural wonder.
Ask, “Why do you think...?”
Children’s ideas are their hypotheses.
Technology is simply the tools offered to and used by children to explore a topic.
Technology doesn’t necessarily mean digital tools and computers. Think of technology as tools such as a pencil, paper, a magnifying glass, and scissors.
Engineering is the process of naming a problem, thinking about solutions, and simply trying them out to see which one works.
Art is encouraging children to illustrate their ideas in creative ways such as dance, music, drawing, poetry, photography, and building models.
Math is counting, comparing, sorting, identifying and using shapes, making patterns, etc.
These skills are accompanied by the rich vocabulary that allows children to talk about their mathematical thinking.
STEAM & the Kindergartener's Cars Project
In the slides below, you will see the story of the Cars Project that began with a simple moment in November of 2024 and continued and expanded with twists and turns through the remainder of the school year until May 2025.
What began as a quest to figure out how to make one child's paper "remote control" car move, branched into a series of several mini-projects investigating topics such as:
Electricity and circuits
Remote controls and robots
Car parts, materials, and mechanisms
Wheels and axles - which led to an 2-month study on Simple Machines
Ramps, gravity, momentum, friction, and slope
Building model cars and designing/refining a test track
Transportation stories
Building our own 3-D city model - complete with a Sunsphere and Lego Smoky Mountain National Park
And so much more!
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