Naomi Meredith  00:00

Fall is in the air, and it is a great time to mix in some themed STEM challenges. These five fall STEM activities to try are perfect for one-day lessons, sub plans, or even class parties. Let's jump right into these low prep challenges.  

Naomi Meredith  00:27

If you haven't learned this about me by now, I love a good theme. You heard all about how I themed out my first unit of the year back in episode four, Welcome to STEM Survival Camp. If you take a peek around my house, I have some fall decorations peeking in the corners on my tables. Of course, I have all of those fall-flavored candles. In turn, I don't always teach themed lessons in my class. It can be really fun to integrate these within your lessons, especially if you need something quick that works for one day. If you really want to extend it throughout the week, all of these challenges will work perfectly for you and across many different grade levels. So let's jump into these five ideas that you can implement in your STEM space.  

Naomi Meredith  01:40

The first fall STEM activity to try is apple and pumpkin lifecycle robotic coding. This is a great low prep challenge that you can use as a station, and students can learn all about the lifecycle of favorite harvest fruits like apples and pumpkins. You can do this challenge for anything, but these two are very popular during the fall season. All you need to do is have each stage of the lifecycle of the pumpkin or apple on different cards, and students will code in a variety of ways to help them learn more about those life cycles. So here are a few variations of this that you can use with the robots that you have in your classroom. This will work well with pretty much any type of robot that you have. The only one I think it might not work best with is Ozobots unless you have a special grid, you could definitely do this in a different way.  

Naomi Meredith  02:40

Speaking of grids, there are grids that you can purchase that are fancy for all of the robots. However, when you are on a budget like most of us, it is sometimes easier to create your own grid that the robots can move along is really helpful for students to visualize the steps that they need their robot to travel. Most robots for children have very specific movements when they are moving forward in one space. You can create your own mat by measuring the distance of one forward move for each robot. However, I have created a lot of these for all the smaller robots and RDS with all the measurements done for you. So you can just print, cut, glue, and create whatever size mat that you want. Of course, all of the challenges that I will be talking about and these gridlines will be linked in the show notes to save you some time with your fall theme planning.  

Naomi Meredith  03:35

So for this lifecycle coding, create a map or use one that you have on hand and have those cards that are about the lifecycle of that living thing. You can even have students be more involved in this creation process. They can create the cards that they will code for that specific lifecycle. Once all of these resources are created, here are variations that you can play with these cards. If you're creating the grid ahead of time, you can laminate the different stages of the lifecycle of the pumpkin or apple. Students will code to those different locations on the grid. Another variation of this challenge is students can be in partnerships. Instead of having the cards laminated on the grid, they can be movable. One partner can place the cards on the grid-facing app, and the other partner will code the robot to gather all of the pieces in order of the lifecycle, and then they can switch. The third variation would be having that partner system, but then they have to code the lifecycle backward. The fourth variation is they can either go backward or forward, but instead of the grid-facing app, they can have them facing down, and it can be more like a memory game.  

Naomi Meredith  04:53

So there are a lot of different variations to this and with the age of your students and their coding experience. It's fun for them to try these different challenges to practice their coding skills. The second fall STEM activity to try is creating one-page inspiration boards that follow along with any of the fall holidays you are discussing in your classroom. These could be things like the Day of the Dead, Thanksgiving, Halloween, or even for the whole month, such as what different things are typical for that month. For instance, for the month of September, October, and November, what are different items that people think of for that month? You can have different pictures on this one-page board that can inspire students to build, such as apples, pumpkins, baskets, you name it. You can have these visuals for students, and then they can build with any materials that you have on hand, whether it'd be items in your Makerspace or if you want to pull out LEGO bricks. I really like using this type of engineer inspiration board with my younger students, especially when a lesson might go quicker than expected. These are really great to have on hand that you can have printed at a station, or you can display on the projector or TV in your classroom.  

Naomi Meredith  06:14

The third fall STEM activity to try is creating a pumpkin bridge. Again, this can be a one-day challenge in your classroom, or, if you want to dive in deeper, you can extend this for the whole week and use the Engineering Design Process. If you are a bit unsure about what the Engineering Design Process is, fairly recently, I had a whole mini-series about the Engineering Design Process where I dove into every single stage of that process to give you ideas on how to teach this in your classroom. So make sure to go back and listen to those because that will help you extend your knowledge whether you use the Engineering Design Process already or looking to gain more knowledge about it. For this pumpkin bridge challenge, you can use any materials you have on hand. I like to use popsicle sticks, tape, and cups. Students will build one of the types of bridges that we talked about in class to hold as many pumpkins as possible. This is fine if you use the pumpkin candies that you can find at the store. You can also use unifix cubes as I have. I'll tell the kids that the pumpkins are square because they came right out of Minecraft. There's a whole lot of buy-in for that, and they don't mind that the pumpkins are different colors. You could do a whole lot of math afterward, like how many pumpkins could it hold, and compare the different bridges in the classroom. You could measure how long the bridge was, how wide the bridge was, or how tall. So there's a whole lot of math that you could do with this STEM challenge.  

Naomi Meredith  07:30

The fourth fall STEM activity to try is pumpkin digital activities. Now this one isn't as hands-on, but it's a great way to implement the T-technology within your classroom if you want something that is paperless and easy to assign. I have two different variations for the grades. So for K through two, I like to create a digital interactive activity that they can use on Seesaw or Google slides that are quick little tasks on each slide. These tasks are helpful for the students because they can practice their digital skills, such as dragging and dropping, drawing on the screen, and labeling a picture. All of those tech skills are important for any type of activity, not just pumpkins. You can create each slide that goes along with a theme, like pumpkins. They can do things like measuring a vine using digital unifix cubes. They can use the shape tools to decorate a picture of the pumpkin or even an alphabet match where students are dragging the letters to help them spell different words such as pumpkins. Having these slides with quick activities helps students be successful. They can work at their own pace and also help each other out when they get stuck. For the older students, you could do something similar, but I also like to give them digital interactive notebooks that help them explore other outside resources that are kid friendly. This is where I like to pull in other resources such as podcasts, videos, paired selections, and nonfiction and fiction texts, and they can respond within the digital interactive notebook. You could share just one slide a day. You could have it be differentiated where certain kids might have specific slides, or you can have it even open-ended, and kids pick the slides that are most interesting to them. So this is a great way to pull in those outside resources that you might have been collecting over the years and assign them to one digital platform.  

Naomi Meredith  08:01

The fifth fall-themed STEM activity to try is having students design a harvest basket. Now, this isn't a lesson that I have in my store yet, maybe by the time this recording comes out, it will be in there. But this would be another fun challenge that you can use the Engineering Design Process or even do it in one day. You can have tiny pumpkins or tiny apples, or even pretend if you're worried about them getting damaged, and students could use materials like straws, popsicle sticks, or string to create a harvest basket to hold as many of these fruits as possible. This will be a great collaboration challenge, and also learn different techniques when it comes to securing items and being able to hold weight. If you wanted to extend this challenge even further, you could have students weigh how many apples or how many pumpkins their basket was able to hold. Then you could compare the weights using greater than and less than place value, or even graphing, depending on the age of your students and the math standards that would tie into those.  

Naomi Meredith  09:04

This was a quick episode today, but just some fun fall STEM activities that you can try in your STEM space and bring the fall into your classroom. So let's go over those five different activities that you can try. First is the apple and pumpkin lifecycle robotic coding. Next, our fall-themed engineer inspiration boards. Third, are pumpkin bridges. Fourth is pumpkin digital activities. And fifth is designing a harvest basket. I hope you enjoyed these fall-themed activities and definitely share with me what you have done in your classroom. I would love to see how it goes with your students.