Naomi Meredith  00:00

Looking for easy November STEM activities to try? In this episode, I will be sharing with you four ideas that you can implement in your classroom right away.  

Naomi Meredith  00:40

There is a lot to celebrate during the month of November, so these STEM challenges that I'm going to be sharing with you aren't tied to a specific holiday or celebration. I tried to mix it up for you so that you could do this all month long or really any fall month. As I said, they're not Thanksgiving specific or any holidays specific. So let's jump into these fun ideas where you can harness the crazy energy during this month and put it into productive use with these STEM challenges. 

Naomi Meredith  01:15

The first STEM Challenge is STEM and Stories, which is one of my favorite things to do in the STEM classroom. It relates to the story, The Great Turkey Race. As a class, listen to the story or read the story out loud. You know that I love pre-recording read-alouds for my students. So if I know I'm going to be doing this book, a lot of times, I can have the video recording of me reading it, and then this gives me a little bit of extra time to set up any materials that I need for the lesson. Either way, you're going to be using The Great Turkey Race, and spoiler alert, there are some turkeys who are going to get eaten, and they want to escape the farm. Your STEM challenge is going to be related to this story, and there are a couple of different things that you can build for this challenge. You can have students build both things that I'm going to mention or one or the other depending on the time you have and the age of your students. 

Naomi Meredith  02:14

First, you'll have students create a simple catapult that will be used to launch the turkeys over the fence, which we'll talk about the fence in a second. There are a lot of different ways that students can build catapults. One of my favorites that I will link in the show notes is a simple video that I created. There are popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and a plastic spoon. The way that we will create the catapult is students will wrap a rubber band around the popsicle sticks. I like to use the big fat ones since they give you more leverage within this challenge. They will wrap the rubber bands around the popsicle stick to hold the plastic spoon, and they will create basically the letter V. So, think about you have a popsicle stick with a spoon on one popsicle stick. Then there's a bottom popsicle stick, and at the tip of the V, you're going to wrap one more rubber band to connect the two, and this will create the letter V, which you will put a stack of popsicle sticks in between that are also secured with rubber bands that will be the fulcrum. This will allow the spoon to be able to be pushed down and eventually launch the turkeys over the fence. 

Naomi Meredith  03:25

What I like to use for turkeys are pom poms. You can even glue pictures of turkeys to bring the story to life. Of course, we have the fence that the turkeys are trying to get over, and students can build their fence using a lot of different materials. My favorite for this challenge is to use raw spaghetti and Crayola modeling clay, which doesn't dry out. It's super inexpensive, and students will use those two materials to design a fence that the catapult will launch the turkeys over. If you're doing this challenge with younger students, the catapult might be a bit tricky. So you can have catapults pre-made before doing this challenge. The younger students may not be able to create the fences. One hack to this so that you're not the one building all of the catapults. If you do this challenge the day before with older students, they could be the ones in charge of the catapults and then save them for the younger students. I don't usually let the students keep the catapults after this challenge because I don't want to be responsible for other objects that will be flying in the classroom. So if you aren't going to save the catapults, I have students cut the rubber bands or untwist the rubber bands, and then we put all of the materials away. They are a little bit sad, but I tell them these are very simple materials to get at home. You can make it the same way or a different way, but we're going to reuse the materials as much as possible. So this is definitely a fun STEM challenge that you can do within the month of November. 

Naomi Meredith  04:57

The second November STEM activity that you can try in your classroom is LEGO corn mazes. I don't know about you, but have you been in a corn maze, especially a haunted corn maze? I have! This was maybe six or seven years ago, and I distinctly remember it was a haunted one, and I was there with some of my friends. My one girlfriend and I were holding tight to each other, and I was so scared. I said, “Becca, I was like, Becca, we're gonna be okay, I'm so scared,” or something like that. In the haunted part, all the employees were saying, “Becca, Becca.” So we're a little bit traumatized. After that experience. I haven't been in a corn maze ever since. Luckily, for this challenge, it's not as scary. Again, this only uses a few materials that you might already have in your classroom. 

Naomi Meredith  06:32

All you need are some big LEGO base plates and LEGO bricks and marbles or any small balls that are similar in size. There are some really great LEGO-like base plates on Amazon that work just as well as the original version. Definitely recommend taking a peek at those, and I'll link those in the show notes for you. I don't recommend using non-LEGO brand Legos since those don't have the same effect. They just don't hit the same way. So students will create their own LEGO corn maze. You can even print out different things that the marble can roll to, like a scarecrow, pumpkins, just different little images that they can attach to their designs. This is fine because this won't take very long in the classroom, and students can test one another's designs. You can even add that last piece where they can count how many dead ends they have, and how long it takes to get from the start to the finish, they could find the average time where they have multiple trials. So you can really extend this project if you would like or if you need a simple one-day challenge. You can do that as well. 

Naomi Meredith  08:35

The third November STEM activity that you can try in your classroom is to create a one-page engineer inspiration board. I love creating these boards, and I have them created for all of the months of the year and all of the major holidays throughout the year. Some of the things that you can celebrate in the month of November are Dia de Los Muertos, which is November 1, Thanksgiving, and you can even have a board that represents Veterans Day or even just the month of November in general. With this one-page board, you can have real images or icon images of things that represent that holiday or that month. This gives students inspiration to build it however they want. This works great for a soft star if you were starting off your day with STEM station rotation or if you need something for a substitute. These engineer inspiration boards are great for that because students can build with whatever materials they have on hand, whether it's Makerspace items, blocks, playdough, or a combination of all those things. Then they can even share their designs by taking a picture or video of their work on the platform that you choose. 

Naomi Meredith  09:47

Finally, the fourth November STEM activity that you can try in your classroom is to create green screen videos that go along with people in STEM that you are thankful for. This is a great literacy and STEM connection because students will do some research about people in STEM who have made an impact. They might already know about some people, or there are so many different things to look up in Epic Books, which is my favorite research tool for students. If you want to hear more about other research tools that I love to use with my students, make sure to go back and check out episode 17. And, of course, I list Epic Books. But there are some other favorites that I love to use in this STEM space as well. Students can research their favorite inventor that they know about or another person instead and find out information about them and how they have made an impact in the world of STEM. You can, of course, have students create a bulletin board of their findings. But I also recommend making this even more interactive. Remember those talking heads that we used to have students do where they colored a picture of the person that they researched? They might even cut out a big hole where they could put their head within that poster board. Or sometimes we have them dress up as that person. Then you have something like a wax museum. Well, take that idea, and let's bump it up a notch. You can have students create a script or a presentation about that person. They can pretend to be that person but use a green screen. If you have students wear a green shirt that matches the green background that you're using or a blue shirt that matches the blue background. My personal favorite, I will say kids with super, super blonde hair, when you do green screen, there's sometimes a tint of green in their hair, just the way the color of their hair is they have more yellow in it, and sometimes their hair will disappear. So I do like using blue because, with blue, I have had fewer issues when it comes to editing. But again, definitely your preference. Have students wear a colored shirt that matches the background, and then they can read their script and pretend to be that person. When you're in the editing app, you can overlay a picture of the real person, but instead of their face, it'll be the student's face. One thing I have done, I don't think it always matters, but you could use a green circle to cover up the person's face that they're talking about to make sure that it's not showing, but I don't think you'd necessarily always have to do that. But play around with it and see what you can do. I have a video example of this linked in the show notes. I remember doing this with my students, and I gave them no prior background. I just pressed play. When I recorded the video, I accidentally didn't press stop right in time. So my head kind of floated off the screen, and the kids started screaming. So make sure to watch my video example. It's pretty fun. But it's a cool way to get kids excited about people in our world that have made a difference in the STEM community or just in our world in general and people that we should definitely be thankful for. 

Naomi Meredith  13:05

As a recap, here are the four November STEM activities that you can try in your classroom. First is the STEM in stories challenge that goes along with the great Turkey race. Next, our LEGO corn mazes. Third, our engineer inspiration boards, and fourth, people in STEM that we're thankful for with a green screen twist. I hope you enjoy these fun, themed challenges. You know, I like a good theme. But I also love lessons that are rooted in standards and have a purpose in mind. It's definitely good to mix these all up because there is a lot of STEM to teach. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I'll see you in the next episode.