Naomi Meredith  00:00

February is known as Black History Month and today I'm going to be sharing with you three STEM activities that you can do with your students to celebrate this time. Of course, these are activities that you can do all year long to help students learn about important people that have made an impact on history and impact in the present. So let's jump in.

Naomi Meredith  00:53

Before we jump into these fun STEM activities, a couple quick announcements for you to keep your eye out for. First of all, if you are loving this podcast, I appreciate all of the DMS that you keep sending me so keep sending them my way. But also share out loud by writing a review. This will not only help me know if this podcast is making an impact for you, but also help other teachers to find this podcast as they're browsing and if it's a good fit for them. So if you're on Apple podcasts or if you're not, login and write a quick review. I would love to read those out loud on the show and to get your voices be heard. Also, if you missed out on the K through two STEM planning workshop, that is okay. If you weren't able to attend live, this is also available as a recording. So the whole session was recorded and together we created a whole cohesive unit where we created a mini project, planned out STEM stations, and assembled stories that would work well in your classroom. So you can jump on in! The link will be in the show notes or you can also jump on in on that workshop at Naomimeredith.com/primaryworkshop. Also, when thinking about the community of us in this elementary STEM teacher world, I am hosting an upcoming monthly book club for you to jump in on. So the coolest part I think is we'll be able to meet together monthly and chat throughout the month about STEM and innovation as a community. Of course, there will be a book that we'll be reading together and some fun little freebies and things along the way. So jump in on the waitlist so you don't miss that when it launches because that's coming up really soon, actually just in time for spring. So again, that'll be linked in the show notes. Or you can find that at Naomimeredith.com/bookclubwaitlist. So if you just head to my website, you can find all this stuff. But super fun things coming your way when it comes to the elementary STEM community. 

Naomi Meredith  02:54

A lot of you might see on my Instagram, but my Teacher Honey and I love to travel. This has been something in our relationship from the beginning. And we travel all the time, especially during the holidays, that's something that we enjoy to do, instead of giving each other's gifts. In December of 2019, we actually traveled to Washington, DC, where they have all the national monuments and all of these amazing museums that you can go into. Most of them are free, which is pretty awesome. But our favorite museum, by far was the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I think it is a fairly new museum. But it was absolutely beautiful and inspiring. We spent practically all day there. We just kept saying how we wish that we had a museum like this where we live in Colorado. So maybe in the future that will happen. But we also wish that this was a museum and an experience that every single state had, and that all students were able to attend because it was just really cool. Learning about American history through this lens and we wish that this was the lens that we were taught in. It was just very impactful for us, and just was so amazing. We just learned a whole bunch. Of course we couldn't get to everything, even with the amount of time that we were there. So definitely a museum, we definitely want to go back to if we're in Washington, DC, again, and I highly, highly, highly recommend going. So if you have to wait in line, wait in line, it is worth your time. We really loved it. So I think you're really going to enjoy these black history month activities that you can use in your STEM classroom. Or even if you're a classroom teacher, you can implement them, but they're definitely a spark for creativity. So let these inspire you where you can think of even more activities that you can integrate in your classroom. 

Naomi Meredith  04:56

The first one is inventor robot coding. During, and when I was getting my master's in STEM leadership, there was a whole bunch of assignments. We were talking about how students need to see role models who are like them, and also unlike them to help inspire them to be things that they never thought imaginable. So there's a huge lack of this I have found in my research when it comes to elementary STEM. So this is a project I have in the works, something on my vision board, to help bring people in STEM to life for children. A really good book to spark this, there are so many more out there, but one that I really love is Have You Thanked an Inventor Today? by Patrice McClaren, and she actually has a few other books in her series. This one is super cool, because it is illustrative but it also talks about inventors from history and in the modern day of inventions that we use in our daily lives, but you might not always know who invented them. So this one is super fun and super engaging. It has some great conversations. And of course, read this book out loud to your class. If you want to get your hands on the book even faster, it is a great price if you get the Kindle version. One hack that I like to do with ebooks is I will screen record myself reading the book for my students and I have my little dog Fredrick in my lap, and I'll talk to him or whatever. I don't post these on my YouTube channel. This is just for classroom use only. But it's a great way where if you're going to read the book over and over again, it is technically you're still reading the book, but then it gives you a little leeway when kids are coming in and all the behaviors stuff. So highly recommend doing that. But this is an awesome book. And so how you can integrate this in your classroom is you can have pictures of the inventors, pictures of the invention they invented, and students have to code and match the inventor to the invention. So if you don't feel like making this, I have this as a forever freebie in my TPT shop. So definitely go and check that out. It connects to the book. And then you can even have students create their own cards if you're learning about other people throughout the school year. And you can keep adding to that robot collection. So really fun way to integrate that robotics in your classroom into learn about people who have been impactful in their daily lives. So just a lot of fun things that you can do in relation to this book, or other books when it comes to important inventors in black history. 

Naomi Meredith  07:28

The next activity that you can do in your classroom to help celebrate Black History Month is having an interactive bulletin board with black women in STEM. So again, learning about people who have been impactful in modern day and in the past. But I have again, another forever freebie for you, where I've done a lot of research about these amazing women. And it includes a short little bio about the person just a little bit about their background to get to the position that they have, or had in STEM, a picture of the person. And then there's a matching card where there are video links, and maybe a website about them, maybe other little things to help you learn more about that person. And you can create an interactive experience for the students. A couple of ways that you could do this in your classroom is of course you can print them out, hang them up on your wall, and then this could be a STEM station that your students traveled to, to learn more about these amazing women. Another way that you could do this is you could have this displayed on your projector or your TV and your classroom. And you can talk about a new person every day, and learn about the cool things that they have done. When I was creating these cards I even found about jobs and people I had never heard about which was so much fun for me. And again, something that is definitely needed in the classroom at the elementary level. So that's why again, these are free for you to use to help you get started with those conversations. And of course, I made them cute for you don't get me wrong, they're very cute. So definitely check those out, add them to your collections of things for this month. 

Naomi Meredith  09:08

And finally, the third way that you can celebrate Black History Month when it comes to STEM activities is having green screen talking heads. I talked about this activity a bit in Episode 37. So go back and take a listen. This is a green screen of variation when it comes to having that talking head project. You probably know what I'm talking about where you have students color and draw the body of a person that they researched about. Then they cut out a hole for their head and they hold it up to them and they pretend they're that person. I am not great at drawing. I wish I was. Some of my siblings are actually really great at this, mine are not the best. It's just not a skill I have developed yet. But a way you can have this variation is students can reasearch about important people in black history. Some great resources for this is Epic Books, of course, love me some Epic Books, and even BrainPOP has some really cool videos that you can use with your students as well as a resource. You can have them research about these people, and then when you go to the green screen recording part, students will wear a solid shirt that matches the background they're recording in front of. So let's say you are having a green screen, you have matching green shirts. And this will actually make the students body disappear. So in the green screen video, their head is actually floating. I have an example of this, I created a video about Mae Jemison, who was her famous astronaut and black history for NASA. I have the video linked in the show notes, check it out, it was my first go around. So I didn't edit out the end. So my head kind of floats off the screen at the end, and the kids got a little bit scared and started screaming. But overall, the content is great. So they can create a script to talk about and just be like this person and represent them and all the things that they learned about and the cool things that they had made an impact in the world and in STEM history for the background. So you have your head that's floating, you can find pictures of those people. And then you could just have make sure you move the students head in front of that image on the screen, do a little configuration, and then it works out it's super fun in a cool way to have an interactive experience. You could save all these videos, create QR codes for all of them, and have an interactive museum that students can travel through. This would be be even cool if you had this in the hallways. And then classes came through throughout the month or multiple months. And they travel through this interactive in house museum field trip. So that's a cool way to get kids moving, especially during the cold winter months we have to get a little bit creative. So that'd be a really cool way for students to learn about other people impactful in history, see their peers who are telling them about it. And it could just be really collaborative that way. If you need a template when it comes to graphic organizer to organizing all their thoughts, I have a template for you. It's just about STEM inventors in general so it can be reused for a lot of different purposes. But I have a little template for you that can help guide the research for this fun green screen project. As a recap, here are three Black History Month STEM activities that you can use in your classroom. First is the inventor robot coding. Next are the black woman and STEM interactive bulletin board or you can make this digital and finally the green screen Talking Heads. Of course, as I said, Don't feel like you have to be limited to the month of February. These are just a jumping off point to help your students learn more about black history through the lens of STEM. But definitely again dive in deeper and use this as a way to spark those conversations and help them learn of how people who have made big impacts in their lives and in our world. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the elementary STEM coach podcast. I would love to connect with you over on Instagram at Naomi Meredith underscore or send me an email to elementary STEM Coach podcast@gmail.com. Also, make sure to check out my website Naomi meredith.com. To see all the show notes from today's episode. Again, check out my K through five STEM resources. Any questions you have needs for resources or ideas for episodes, get in touch. I'll talk to you soon.