The students in Ms. Douglas’ Second Grade class are setting a great example that it is never too early to be introduced to the STEM learning experience. When students’ regular classwork is completed or their morning station rotation is STEM, they can take one STEM bin at a time, either to their seat or a more quiet carpet area, so as not to distract other students who are working, and get a quiet moment to engineer. They use the materials in their STEM bin to construct as many different structures on the cards as they can. Instead of being just “busy,” students are engaged in creative, complex tasks and are encouraged to think like inventors.

The STEM bins that the students may choose from are plastic school boxes filled with engineering manipulatives of the teacher’s choice, such as Legos, pattern blocks, base ten blocks, unifix cubes, toothpicks and playdough, or popsicle sticks with velcro on the ends. The boxes also contain small sets of task cards on metal rings that picture a variety of basic engineering structures. Ms. Gwendolyn Douglas shared, “The kinesthetic learners, spatial learners, and logical learners love exploring the different possibilities for the building materials as they try to construct more challenging structures. I challenge the students to draw pictures of their different structures along with their written component. Most of my Second Graders can “Build, Draw, and Write” with descriptive sentences or imaginative stories about their structures. The students’ written work is displayed in our STEM station so students can see examples of excellent written responses.”
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Picture 1: Student, Evan Moore, preparing to start his STEM assignment Picture 2: Student, Daniel Suico working on his STEM project. Picture 3: Evan Moore and Arianna Mohammed working in their STEM project.