Our class consists of two dozen uniquely energetic, creative, motivated seven- and eight-year-old students, heading full STEAM ahead into second grade. Ours is a neighborhood school, serving the families of our city since 1953. Our class and the school has an amazing group of children from a fabulously diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. Unfortunately, high poverty is part of the experience for most of these young learners.
These wonderfully wiggly young learners deserve every advantage as we work together to improve achievement in reading, math, and science by focusing on the whole child - building confidence while fostering their creativity and curiosity.
Lifelong learners are created by lighting the spark of imagination that drives a passion to learn.
I teach my students through rich, integrated units that make connections between literature, science, math, social studies, and the arts. Every unit begins with all of us together at the carpet, with a rich piece of children's literature.
Thank you for taking the time to read about how we can work together to ensure these students have the technology tools for imaginative creation, collaboration, and authentic STEM learning experiences in our classroom!
My Project
I was very fortunate this summer to be able to attend a Lego Education Professional Development session with many other Tacoma Public Schools educators. We spend the day building and learning with these amazing WeDo 2.0 robotics sets! I am really excited about the prospect of implementing this learning in the classroom. These will connect directly to our STEM and physical science content, but perhaps more importantly will support social emotional learning.
Collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, and even turn-taking and compromise are vital life skills that are fostered through working in teams to build and program these robots.
They are so versatile, too! Every student I know loves to build with bricks, and this takes it up to a whole new level.
Students will be able to develop many of the standards of mathematical practice as they build and code, such as making sense of problems and persevering in solving them, finding patterns, making use of structure, and attending to precision. These tools will help me to nurture their social emotional learning as well, as we work on collaborative, cooperative learning skills. Working in teams takes practice and is so much easier when the task is an extremely engaging one!
Bringing this Lego Education technology to the classroom also helps to create a level, equitable playing field for all students, regardless of background and ability. My students will all be able to become Lego WeDo "experts" together. Thank you for reading about one way to support my Second Graders!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Wilson and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
