Imagination Station: in addition to cohosting events and enrichment programs, the executive team at IS has met with the Sunnyside STEM Leadership Team to provide insights, expertise, and feedback on our STEM program and how it can be the basis for their after-school and weekend extension activities.

The professors of Purdue University's Teacher in Practice meet weekly with STEM participants as well as with the STEM Leadership Team to review feedback from students and discuss strategies to continually strengthen the teacher preparation program.

Rigamajig/KaBoom: In exchange for providing research subjects (Sunnyside students) to be filmed and analyzed building with "A large-scale building kit used for hands-on free play and playful STE(A)M learning," the researchers from Rigamajig/KaBoom observed various lessons of the Sunnyside STEM program. Their observations and follow up discussions with STEM teachers focused on the same Rigamajig Play Principles that could be incorporated into STEM lessons:

• Watch for children’s teamwork in their thinking and construction. Offer encouraging words about working together to build something.

• Pay particular attention to how children go about their construction process. Do they seem to have a specific goal? Or, do they seem more focused on learning about the properties of the materials and different things they can do with them?

As a results, STEM teachers now take into consideration the dynamics of interpersonal skills as a constraint in the engineering design processes.

As a building-wide initiative to use the best practice of Close Reading (rereading and reflecting to draw new conclusions and understandings about the ideas in text) to build in more nonfictional reading, both the STEM and Humanities teachers have used this strategy to have students research and study different STEM careers. Each quarterly design task ties-in a career aspect, often associated with the Close Read.

Sunnyside also participates in the annual Manufacturing Week/Month presented by the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce to introduce students to local manufacturing careers and pathways to those careers.

Surveys, interviews, and suggestions from students is how a vast majority of our after-school opportunities we derived. We are fortunate to be able to provide after-school activity buses to transport any student who elects to stay after school for an activity.

Cooking Club: open to all Sunnyside students, the two-day a week club meets to plan, prepare, and present age appropriate after school snacks utilizing STEM skills (see included lessons)

Robotics: as part of the Lafayette Jefferson High School First Robotics program, Sunnyside provides a competitive robotics program through First that feeds into our secondary program.

M.A.T.H. Bowl: annual math competition hosted by the Indiana Association of School Principals. Sunnyside 5th and 6th graders are eligible to participate.

Girls Who Code: a national non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in technology. Our programs educate, equip, and inspire girls with the computing skills they'll need to pursue 21st century opportunities.

Girls STEM: to inspire girls to showcase their STEM skills and to explore STEM careers through service-based activities.

Algebra by 7th Grade (Ab7G): an engaging math enrichment program aimed to increase the number of underrepresented 7th-grade students that are academically prepared to take algebra. Hosted by the Purdue University Minority Engineering Program