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Making the Early Childhood STEAM connection

Lesley students engage in Scratch Jr.

Lesley Associate Professor Yvonne Liu-Constant brought her students into the Lesley Makerspace to experience a variety of STEAM activities within the context of their Integrated Curriculum for Early Childhood: Science and Health course.

Working in groups, the students eagerly engaged in Olympic inspired challenges developmentally appropriate for K-2nd grade learners:

  • Stop motion animation to make learning visible.
  • Luge Course Activity: low-tech hands-on engineering.
  • Bee-Bot synchronized swimming: programming, logic.
  • Scratch Jr: storytelling, sequencing, coding.
  • MaKey MaKey Olympic music: conductive materials, exploration of circuits.

Lesley students engage in engineering challenge

Throughout the evening course, groups were tasked with documenting the learning process by creating an eBook using the iPad app, Book Creator. They captured reflections by text, photos and video as a running self-assessment as they made their way through the variety of challenges.

A couple videos of making in action:

Stop Motion Animation

Bee-Bot programming