Making STEM Come Alive for Elementary Students

Matter & Volume - An Integrated STEM Unit

Katie's goal is to help her 4th and 5th grade students become proficient in understanding Matter and Volume through a cross-curricular unit that meets her state standards. To do so, she's incorporated curriculum from the Learning.com STEM Solution which includes Math, Science, and Technology Literacy curricula.

And she used Learning.com's easy-to-use tools to create and save her own lessons and activities, integrating them into a cohesive and comprehensive unit all saved online on Learning.com's platform.
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Finding Curriculum

With Learning.com's "Find" feature, Katie quickly searched through Learning.com curricula to review and select what she needed to address the key concepts she wanted to cover. "It was very easy to use the 'Find' tool on Learning.com to met my goals," says Katie. "It's intuitive, and it made it fast to get what I needed."
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First Activity: Oobleck

Katie first introduced the unit with a multi-part activity. She started by reading Dr. Seuss’ book, “Bartholomew and the Oobleck” to the class. Then she led the class in making Oobleck – the cornstarch, water and food coloring concoction in the book. She incorporated a hands-on lesson next, directing students to practice finding mass and volume of their Oobleck using graduated cylinders and triple beam balances. She's also included an educational video describing Oobleck as Non-Newtonian Fluids.
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Interactive Journaling

Katie included a variety of journaling activities in her STEM unit – from asking students to reflect on questions she posed in an online Journal, to practicing note-taking skills. In this journal activity, she asked students to use their knowledge of matter to write a story about Oobleck.
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Engaging Science Game

She's also interspersed educational science games. She plans to use her interactive whiteboard for the Treasure Hunt Game to challenge her students. They will apply their knowledge of the properties of metals to manipulate the electrical and thermal conductivity, luster, ductility, malleability, melting point, magnetization, and density of metal objects to solve puzzles on their way to unearthing the final treasure.
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Learning About Spreadsheets

Because Katie knows her students have a range of abilities with technology tools, she integrated lessons from Learning.com’s EasyTech - a technology literacy curriculum that provides students with interactive instruction and practice in lessons like Graphing in Spreadsheets. Including these lessons in her unit will save her time, and save her students frustration because they can go online anytime, anywhere to participate in the spreadsheet lessons before they tackle some of the assignments that require spreadsheets.

Hands-on Lab Learning

Next, Katie included a hands-on lab - Phase Change Lab - in which students work in small groups on a science project to change ice to water and then to steam. They will collect temperature readings in one-minute intervals and record them in a spreadsheet and then represent their data on a line graph.
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Matter Test

Last, Katie’s included a final Matter Test to wrap up the unit and get data on how well her students are grasping the key concepts for Matter. She’s written this test using Learning.com’s Journal tool that enables students to respond online, and for her to make comments and give feedback along with the student’s grade.
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Sharing Lessons

Learning.com also makes it possible for Katie to share her unit plan and the lessons and activities she’s created with other teachers throughout the Learning.com community of subscribers. She simply selects "Share this content" for each of her lessons and activites, which will enable other teachers to find and use her shared materials.