Ottawa Elementary students’ curiosity stoked by STEM labs

When McKinley Elementary STEM teacher Bryer Lehr asked his students to track how much water their family uses in a day over Thanksgiving break, the kids responded with all kinds of creative, specific questions.

“Do I count giving my dog a bath?” one of the students asked after being told showers should count for the total.

“I already know we use a lot of water,” another student said. “My family takes too long in the shower.”

A third student thought she was going to have to go through and ask everyone in her apartment building how much water they use. Lehr assured her that was not the case.

The questions aren’t strange, but they’re evident of third grade students taught to look at the world in an analytical way. These students are seeking the kinds of context that’s important in the STEM field (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and this grasp for context isn’t exclusive to Lehr’s third grade students.

As the Ottawa Elementary school board and Superintendent Cleve Threadgill toured the district to see how students were taking to STEM courses, they witnessed students Wednesday asking questions and making conjectures based on the world around them in courses Director of Curriculum Christine Bucciarelli said are meant to get students applying their education in practical ways.

“We didn’t really fully implement STEM courses until this year because we couldn’t implement it while the students were on remote work,” Bucciarelli said. “We could put pieces of it together but this is where everything came together this year, from the nonfiction to the fiction, then to the students’ hands where we can put everything together in a month.”

The STEM program is set up in month-long modules where students go to a special STEM class once per week that, for the younger students, incorporates elements of fiction and nonfiction literature to help them better understand the concepts.

For example, Jefferson Elementary teacher Morgan Brown read to students from a picture book about the life of conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson before taking the children on a walk through the neighborhood surrounding the school to let them see how nature changes through the seasons.

“It ties into real world things,” Brown said. “We work a lot on communication in here, the kids learning how to collaborate and talk to each other to build problem solving skills they can use in adulthood.”

Brown said her last unit with the students taught them about Hurricane Katrina and what made it so devastating, and the children learned how to build a levee as part of their project.

These STEM courses focused on application start in kindergarten and run all the way through eighth grade with the intent of helping students grow skills that will prepare them for future careers in STEM fields. Once students reach sixth grade at Central Intermediate School, they have the opportunity to take classes in the zSpace, a converted computer lab full of special computers that use a kind of glasses that make the screen turn 3-D. Students use a motion-controlled stylus to interact with the 3-D models on the screen.

Fifth and sixth grade STEM teacher Nicole Heaver’s class used the zSpace lap to learn about volcanoes, using the stylus to rotate and pull them apart to see the insides.

“We talked about volcanoes first through observation,” Heaver said. “They had to draw them but it was really just a ‘what do you think?’ I didn’t queue them for how things worked or why things worked.”

Heaver said it started as students going off of their previous knowledge before heading in Wednesday to view the isolated models to give them the knowledge of how volcanoes actually work.

“This is their third week, so they’ve been in here for two and a half weeks looking at things like plate tectonics, Pangaea and continental drift,” Heaver said. “They got to see all the continents shifting, so we’re building off this.”

The older students at Shepherd Middle School are able to study somewhat independently based on their interests. Two seventh graders, Laurence and Caiden, studied data to help them learn how to build a bridge for their civil engineering guided module

Laurence said the next part of their project will involve taking 20 linear feet of balsa wood to build into a functioning bridge.

Threadgill said the implementation of the STEM program started five or six years ago thanks to the Spangler Endowment, for which the Central STEM lab is named after.

“The goal is to meet the needs of as many people as possible and we’re looking, the board and myself, we looked at what types of educational practices have the greatest impact on student achievement,” Threadgill said. “I made a presentation to the board and made recommendations that we hire and expand our programming based on what’s going to impact students in the most effective manner.”

Threadgill said the district made the request and after $180,000 in loans and donations from the community on top of the money from the Spangler Endowment, the program was able to grow.

“Science, technology, engineering and math, and certainly engineering are the areas that we are now in need of,” Threadgill said. “It’s better to send more people into that field and allow children to tap into their curiosity and their willingness to try new things outside the box.”

Bucciarelli said getting a program like this involved her having to think outside the box, as the initial plan for STEM courses meant meeting once per week.

She said she finally found a program that started in Rockford that’s based in literacy for younger children and allows for students the opportunity to pick up on things adults typically won’t.