Educator
Featured Activities
STEM Activities for Your Classroom
E-Learning
Will we be doing more e-Teaching and e-Learning in the future, even when the Covid-19 pandemic is behind us? E-Learning is useful for snow days, and has worked in the past for homebound students; some K-12 educators are embracing it. Teachers and students in higher education have been using it successfully; the term was coined in 1999, and it appears that it was happening a couple of decades prior to that. For now, at-home resources may be useful to you during this challenging, and possibly transitional, time in education. Here we list some that we feel are useful:
STEAM activities, some that can be done at school, some at home with minimal materials and altered instructions. Examples: Design and build a mobile that warns birds away from a window or a building, Windy City Tower, Step Launcher, Keep an Ice Cube from Melting. Categorized by grade level.
This San Francisco science museum has hands-on “Science Snacks,” teacher-tested activities for classroom and home. With inexpensive, easily-available materials, and detailed instructions, these are adaptable to a range of curricula, content areas, and grade levels.
Packed with info, this site offers hands-on resources for school and home: activities, interactive tools, videos, and career info.
Build a Bridge, Wings and Things, Sound all Around, and three more. Forty-five-minute labs, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) aligned for grades 1–4, to spark curiosity, promote critical thinking and problem solving.
Chicago’s own, for at-home activities, check out their Learning Labs: Mission to Mars, Forensics – Chromatography, and Building Bridges. Jr. Science Cafes feature videos with STEM professionals.
Teaching about Air, Water, Energy, Resource Conservation, or Soil? This well-known organization in DuPage County has an online library of videos and downloadable materials to enable students’ remote learning. Curriculum materials follow NGSS.