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I often get asked the question, what resources should I be using to teach the science part in STEM? How do I even fit it all in? In today's episode, I will be sharing with you my top favorite research websites and resources to help build background and teach the science in STEM. 

00:51

For this episode, I have a free engineering design poster and planning guide that can help you get started when you are integrating the Engineering Design Process in your classroom. You can grab it using this link Naomimeredith.com/podcastEDP. This will also be linked in the show notes, so you don't have to memorize it. The resources that I will be sharing with you today are my absolute favorite from back when I was a classroom teacher. They are also things that I love using in my STEM space. Now, I am not sponsored by any of these programs yet, but I just wanted to share with you what has worked really well with my students and things that I think that you will really enjoy. Now with the limited time I have with kids, I don't have the luxury of having the kids research all the resources on their own. So within these different platforms that I'm going to be sharing with you, I actually pre-research using these tools and then share the links with students so that they can get right to the information that they need. Researching is an important skill, and I know it is a standard. Like I said, with the short amount of time that I have, I really have to get to the heart of what I want kids to know and the background knowledge and science concepts that will help with their projects. 

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So let's dive into these resources. I think that you're going to be obsessed with them as much as I am. Now don't feel like you have to memorize all of these links. Again, these will be in the show notes for you, so you can have that right at your fingertips. The first Research website that I absolutely love using in my STEM classroom is Epic Books. Now, if you haven't heard of Epic Books before, you need to jump on this bandwagon, it is worth your time 100%. What is so amazing about this platform is that it is free for teachers to use in the classroom. It provides a library of ebooks, audiobooks, read-to-me books, and videos that aren't connected to YouTube. I highly recommend this resource. It even works on any type of device, which is so helpful, especially since there are so many different devices that are in our schools. 

03:17

Now, as a STEM teacher, I do teach over 500 kids over the course of the month, and that would be a lot of different Epic Books accounts for me to track. So instead of grabbing the classroom teachers' code or creating separate classes for all of them, I actually have one designated epic books account that I use for all of my STEM classes. The way that I set up my Epic Books account is for the student names I just put in a number. So when students log in using my code, they just choose the classroom number that they are associated with. This is extremely helpful because I have specific collections that I create when it relates to the project. That way, I just have to send the collection to one class, and it can be used over the course of the month. This is just a great little hack. So if you feel like when you came from the classroom, you couldn't use epic books anymore, you definitely can. 

04:17

So here's an example lesson that I have taught using Epic Books as a tool for researching for a project. For this example, it is a second-grade 3D printing lesson, and their goal was to create a birdhouse to help the birds in their area. During that imagined stage, I wanted students to see different examples of ways they could enhance their birdhouses and upgrade their designs from the typical house design that we have in our heads. The collection that I made in Epic Books included buildings, architecture, and bird nests for inspiration and being able to see how birds create their homes which influenced their designs as well. There are a few books within Epic Books that are all about building a birdhouse. Having this variety of books is really helpful for students because they can browse through the pictures, read the words and look at the captions to help them imagine different possibilities for their designs. On their little sheet, I had them draw the things that they really liked and things that they might want to include in their plan. Again, this isn't their formal plan, but just gathering as many ideas as possible. Whether or not they tried those ideas, at least they had something going into their plan based on the collection of books that they viewed. 

05:40

The second research tool that I love to use in my STEM classroom is the website called Kiddle. It's spelled K-I-D-D-L-E. Again, this is another free platform that you can use in your classroom, and it is an online encyclopedia. Now, be mindful of the grade level that you use this with. It's best fitted for third, fourth, fifth, and up. So, I wouldn't recommend using this for the primary grades. This is another great research tool where students can gather information about things more in detail. When I was doing a project for third grade, they were creating an invention to help prevent the effects of flooding. What I did when using this tool was I looked up different points in history where floods made a ginormous impact in the area and created QR codes about those different places that students could explore even further. Also, you don't have to create QR codes. That's just how I shared the links to the places. You could definitely link within Google Classroom or Seesaw as well. This is an awesome tool. The articles are really short, and they usually have a few pictures to help students visualize what they're learning about. 

06:58

The third research tool that I love to use in my STEM classroom that I am obsessed with is the YouTube channel SciShow Kids. The girl on the show, I forget her name, I would love to meet her. I am putting this on my vision board: she is someone that I would love to eventually interview on this podcast. So let's hope that this can happen. I love using this resource tool in my STEM classroom as opposed to BrainPOP because I know the classroom teachers are using BrainPOP all the time since we have a school subscription. I am also teaching the same standards as them with a STEM twist. I don't want to overlap the videos that are being used. BrainPOP is an amazing resource that is a paid subscription and highly recommended. If you don't have a subscription, or if you don't want to overlap and take over the videos that they're also using, I recommend SciShow Kids. 

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What's great about these videos is that there's a host that talks, and then there's her little sidekick squeaks, a little mouse. They talk about different science concepts within a few minutes. They also have videos of different science experiments that you could try, which would be great for one-day lessons if that's something that you're looking for. When I use this, I use it with K through five since the younger kids enjoy them a bit more. There are some topics that are relevant for the third, fourth, and fifth, and they like them too. How I used it for first grade is we were talking about the sun, moon, stars, and all the things that appear in our night sky. We were doing station rotations for each of those things, and there was a related video on SciShow Kids that could teach the kids a little more science about what they were going to do in their stations. For example, one of the stations was to build constellations using geoboards. The video we watched before going into our stations was from SciShow Kids explaining what constellations are and some of the ones that you might see in the night sky. So, not overloading kids with all of the science at once, but really breaking it down with short video clips before they spend most of their time working. 

09:24

Another resource to integrate into your lessons is podcasts, specifically science podcasts. Now you are here, you're listening, or maybe you're watching the video version of the podcast. But podcasts are another great tool that is really underutilized within classrooms. Now the two podcasts that I really love that relate to science are Brains On and Tumble Science. Fun fact: back on my previous podcast that I hosted with another teacher, we interviewed one of the hosts from Tumble Science. That was so much fun because that was a podcast that I used in my third-grade classroom all the time, and the kids started to love listening to podcasts. Here I was years later talking to the host, so that was definitely a full circle moment, that was so a core memory. That's for sure. I recommend using these podcasts, and if you're wondering how to listen to them with kids, both have their own websites where within each episode, there's a player that is embedded on the website page so students can listen to the podcast. You don't necessarily have to download a podcasting app for kids to listen to. Often those are blocked by your school filter anyway. But you can link the page that relates to the episode and use that as a tool. Now, both podcast shows, Tumble Science and Brains On, have episodes that are quite lengthy. So you might have a specific part that you want students to listen to either as a whole class or independently. 

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Another way that you can use this if you do want to use the full episode is that this is a really great visualization task. When I am recording videos in the classroom with students, I need the other kids who are not recording to do a quiet task, so we can hear the ones who are on camera more clearly. I'll assign a couple of related podcast episodes to the topic that we're working on, and then students are drawing what the picture is that they're visualizing in their minds. Now, this seems simple enough, but trust me, kids really have a hard time making pictures in their heads. I've had a lot of students tell me, that they don't see anything in their head when it's being spoken to them. So definitely a skill for kids to work on. Now, we teach that podcasts are about listening and paying attention to the details. There's nothing to watch, usually, which is hard for kids because they're so used to watching lots of videos. For most students, podcasts are a new concept. So this is a great way to get kids into listening to podcasts and work on their visualization skills. 

12:22

The fifth resource that I love to use within my STEM classroom is National Geographic Kids. As a teacher, I do have a subscription to the adult version of National Geographic, which is a great tool that I use to help when I am researching for my lesson, but the kid website doesn't require a subscription. The website pages are visually appealing, and they have so many great nonfiction text features like maps, photographs, and captions, all the things that we teach kids about to recognize in print are available on this site. My two favorite categories to use on this website are the animal category and countries. The animal category is linked by its classifications. When you dive in deeper, there are different things about countries and places in the world. This is a great way to really focus on specific animals that kids are researching about or specific places, and they have enough information where they can comprehend what's being said, but it's not overwhelming. One way that I use this resource is for a third-grade 3D printing lesson. During this lesson, students were creating the life cycle of the living thing of their choice. We used Epic Books and the National Geographic Kids as resources that I offered to students to help them learn more about their animal and its lifecycle. I also wanted students to recognize different things that would impact their lifecycle for good or for bad. This would help them draw those inferences on what could affect the lifecycle of their living thing. I recommend the National Geographic Kids as a tool within your space. 

14:12

The sixth resource that I love to use in my classroom is the San Diego Zoo kids' live animal cameras. Now I do have my own live animal camera that I let my students explore. I have a Furbo dog camera at home in my laundry room, and it zooms in on my little dog Frederick, and we can check on him throughout the day when he's not at doggy daycare. The kids actually ask me all the time if we can check on Frederick. I started using this as a behavior incentive in my classroom, and the kids get so excited that they always want me to throw him treats. Now he is the sad little boy when I'm not home, and I tell them nobody wants treats thrown at them when they're sleeping, and they agree, which took some convincing to not throw treats at him. So a similar concept, if you don't have a Furbo, is the live animal cameras at the San Diego Zoo. They don't have cameras at all of the exhibits, but they have them at the most favorite animal exhibits, and almost all of them are live. It's so much fun to go back in and check on them. One time when we were checking in with my first-grade class, there was the condor which is like a vulture, and we noticed that there was an egg within the nest. Each day we kept checking in on the egg, and it was still an egg. A month later, we checked in one more time, and the egg had hatched, and there was a baby condor. So that was super cool that we could see the journey within a month's time of the baby being in the egg and then popping out and just being this ugly little bird that was walking around. That was super exciting. As I said, I did use this with first grade. For our 3D printing unit, students were noticing the similarities and differences between animal babies and their adults. This was one of the resources that we used to help observe animals in their zoo habitats. 

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As a recap, here are the six different resources that you can use in your STEM space to really enhance the imagined stage and research stage of the Engineering Design Process and all sorts of various projects. First, Epic Books. Second Kiddle. Third, science podcasts for kids including Brains On and Tumble Science. Fourth, SciShow Kids YouTube channel. Fifth, the National Geographic Kids website, and sixth, the San Diego Zoo kids live zoo cameras. I'll be continuing to dive into the Engineering Design Process in this mini-series, so make sure you tune in to the next few episodes where you can get ideas to really enhance that process. Also, don't forget to grab your free Engineering Design Process poster and planning guide to help you gather all of these resources and ideas and plan thoughtful lessons. You can grab that in the show notes or using this direct link: Naomimeredith.com/podcastED.