STEM Resources

Science, technology, engineering, art, and math work together to make learning fun in these STEAM lessons!

Perfect for Makerspace!

This kindergarten teacher resource book includes:

• A year's worth of teacher lesson plans
• STEAM design challenges that turn elementary students into inventors
• Easy-to-follow lesson format (with standards identified for each lesson)
• Classroom-tested lessons

The STEAM Design Challenges in this book follow engineering practices to teach students in kindergarten to solve a problem by designing, creating, and justifying their designs. They also allow art to support and enhance the learning of science and math while the engineering process is followed.

These engaging STEAM lessons:

• Integrate the Next Generation Science Standards and national standards from other disciplines
• Enhance learning across various disciplines
• Facilitate students in collaborating to solve real-world scenarios
• Promote critical thinking, analytical thinking, and reflective thinking
• Incorporate the Five Es Instructional Model (engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate)
• Are classroom tested

Engineering Design Process
The lessons in this book are intended to support the engineering design process in which teachers become a facilitator by encouraging and guiding students to work as a team to find a creative solution to a real-world problem without providing step-by-step instructions. Students are inspired to act as scientists and engineers through the use of sketches, diagrams, mathematical relationships, and literacy connections. By creating their very own models and products based on background information from their studies, students are immediately engaged through a meaningful, rewarding lesson.

More about the lessons
Each lesson begins by presenting students with a design challenge scenario in order to immediately excite students with a real-world situation that they are on a mission to solve. Students are then given a dilemma, mission, and blueprint design sheet and are asked to collaborate with team members to create several prototypes. Students present their prototypes to their teacher, construct their design, test their design, engage in a class discussion about their design, and then modify their design. Finally, teams create a justification piece in order to sell their new prototype (ex. persuasive letter, video, advertisement etc.).

About the Authors
The Steam Dreamers, a group of four classroom teachers, desired to create more interactive learning environments and science classrooms through student-centered problem-solving lessons. They created this collection of cross-curricular design challenge lessons to provide teachers and students with real-world scenarios that are driven by core learning standards and enriched through the inclusion of literacy and the arts.

We have mashed-up a marble run and a pool table to design the Smartivity Roller Coaster Marble Slide S.T.E.M. Educational D.I.Y. Toy kit. This project is based on the fundamentals of gravity, centrifugal force and banking. The kit contains all the elements needed to assemble the Roller Coaster Marble Slide.

A mix of slider game and pool table, this project is loads of fun to build and play. Once built, a kid can raise marbles along the wheel, and release them. As the marble slides down the track, they can aim the marble with the help of levers on the two sides. On the marble-pool part of the game, kids can place marbles, in such a way that the striker marble coming from the slide track hits them and the strike sends them in the corner or side pockets

The Mark Twain Life Science book helps students develop communication skills for STEM success.

STEM Labs for Life Science by Mark Twain includes 26 fun, integrated labs that help students understand concepts such as:

• life
• human body systems
• ecosystems

This middle school life science book encourages students to collaborate and communicate to solve real-world problems.

The STEM Labs for Life Science book for sixth–eighth grades features introductory materials to explain STEM education concepts and provides materials for instruction and assessment. Correlated to meet current state standards, each lab combines the following essential STEM concepts:

• communication
• creativity
• teamwork
• critical thinking

The Mark Twain Publishing Company provides classroom decorations and supplemental books for middle-grade and upper-grade classrooms. These products are designed by leading educators and cover science, math, behavior management, history, government, language arts, fine arts, and social studies.