The Anatomy of an Early Childhood STEM Lesson

In an educational world focused on checking off boxes next to learning targets and curriculum standards, it is easy to lose sight of our absolute responsibility to develop the whole learner.

Today my young fives class (developmental kindergarten, transitional k, pre-k) was working on sorting natural and engineered objects. To the casual observer, it might look like this is the most basic of tasks but I want to unpack the lesson design a bit to show all that is thought of when crafting an activity like this and all that students are actually getting from participating in it.

The thumbnail sketch: After a group discussion on what qualifies objects as one or the other, they headed to work stations and began by each labeling a piece of paper with the words natural on one side and engineered on the other side. From there they had to cut out pictures of things from old bird watching magazines and then glue them on the appropriate side. It would be really easy to judge the success and failure of the lesson on how many correctly-sorted pictures the students glued on each side, but there are so many other layers to this.

Starting with a standard: Standards are incredibly important and without a doubt play a huge role in what you want students to accomplish, but they are just a guide. They also can be really wordy as evidenced by this Indiana Department of Education kindergarten science standard from 2016. Here is one that would fit our activity, as it focuses on developing models to show scientific knowledge.

"A practice of both science and engineering is to use and construct conceptual models that illustrate ideas and explanations. Models are used to develop questions, predictions and explanations; analyze and identify flaws in systems; build and revise scientific explanations and proposed engineered systems; and communicate ideas. Measurements and observations are used to revise and improve models and designs. Models include, but are not limited to: diagrams, drawings, physical replicas, mathematical representations, analogies, and other technological models." 

This barely makes sense to teachers so I am always tremendously hesitant to put a lot of standards language in front of kids, especially 4 and 5-year-olds. My learning target today simply stated, "I can sort natural and engineered things." which still took ample instruction and vocabulary development for kids to understand what it means to sort and then of course what makes something engineered or natural.

Reverse engineer it: I always start with the end product in mind and then try to figure out how I am going to get these students to do that as independently as possible. For this lesson, there was a lot to consider.

• Where are we going to get material to cut up?
• Does that material have a nice balance of natural and engineered things in it?
• Do I have enough of the magazines for all students?
• What is the glue stick situation looking like?
• Are those words too much to ask students in young fives to write?
• How long is this going to take?
• What is the stress level for young learners going to be? Can they handle it?

These are just some of the hundreds, if not thousands of considerations every early childhood teacher ponders every time they create a new lesson or self-evaluate what needs to be tweaked the next time they teach something. So in the end, it is a lot more than just throwing out some paper and art supplies. 

Peeling back the layers: Having students be able to successfully sort the two kinds of objects is the top layer of a multi-tiered construct. Hitting the target is the big goal, but in no way should wholesale success or failure be measured simply by how many kids hit that objective. Rather, look at how much was gained for the "whole learner" through the process. 

• Social layer: I am a huge proponent of kids working at tables and having to share materials. In too many aspects of life, kids have individualized everything. Sometimes I will purposely short-change groups on supplies, forcing them to have to communicate with other groups and even have to cut deals with other groups for the supplies they need. The other day, there were only three cardboard saws for five teams of third graders to build something. You should have seen the looks of bewilderment before we began. How could this ever work? For today's activity, there was a shared bucket of markers and one magazine for every two kids. They had to be communicators to get what they needed. Increasingly, I am having to explicitly teach the sharing of materials but the more I can work this social piece into learning, the more kids will develop these key skills.
  
• Fine motor layer: Just as we as educators are seeing kids struggle to share, we are seeing a decrease in fine motor skill levels. One of the ways I work to fill this deficit is by incorporating a lot of cutting activities. I also insist that students have access to scissors that cut easily. I still have bad memories of how poorly the scissors I had to use in kindergarten and first grade cut paper and how badly they hurt my hands. Although it sometimes terrifies visitors to my classroom, I prefer having my students use big "grownup" scissors. Kids are not cutting enough on their own at home these days. Period.
  
  The labeling of "natural" and "engineered" is another intentional part of fostering fine motor development. I could have easily done this for them by printing those words at the top of each side of the paper. By having them do that, it gave them more writing practice. They had to copy it off of the whiteboard from the introductory discussion, but most were able to accomplish it independently. I really didn't care that some took the entire side to fit in the word. Others needed a paraprofessional or me to write it on a separate paper close to them. In the end, any writing practice is beneficial to individual kids as long as it is on their level.
  
• Aesthetic layer: I have never been against adding the "A" to STEM to make it STEAM with an emphasis on including art, but I consider aesthetics already engrained into a majority of our STEM activities. How something looks is a huge part of design and engineering. The selection of the objects they choose to cut, how well they cut, and how they arrange those items on their paper is another important skill being developed during an activity about whether things are natural or engineered. Unfortunately, activities that involve this aesthetic layer and the fine motor layer too, are often simply viewed as fluff or too inefficient when the pressure to check off a standard and move on to the next takes control of lesson design. As efficient as things like Scantrons or Google Docs and Forms can be, kids lose out on opportunities to grow in the aesthetic domain. 

Even though this is a pre-kindergarten lesson, the design principals are often at the heart of all of the STEM activities I create for my students. After 26 years in the classroom, it has become pretty natural, but I still will stop and look at something we are doing and find places where I can intentionally layer in opportunities for kids to grow while working toward  completely unrelated standards. 

Here is the saving grace. When you create like this and your kids get into a funk on and can't seem to ever nail that standard or learning target you have posted, you won't feel like a total failure because you will be able to point to all of the other layered skills they practiced while totally blowing it with the big goal.