Welcome to the Elementary STEM Coach Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Meredith, a former classroom teacher turned K-5 STEM teacher and coach. With over a decade of experience teaching and a master's degree in STEM leadership, I'm here to coach you throughout the year to help you gain back more time to create innovative experiences for your students.

Raise your hand if you are teaching during Thanksgiving week. If you're watching the video version, I am raising my hand. I am currently in the middle of long term K-5 STEM subbing for one of my friends in the STEM teacher community.

And at the time of this recording, I have just completed my first month in this job. So that has been really fun. I finally have met all of the kids in the school.

And we do have school Monday and Tuesday, the week of Thanksgiving. So I feel your pain, or not pain. I mean, hey, maybe you're very excited to teach that week.

But I understand where you're coming from. And maybe you want something seasonal that you can do with your students. And so I'm going to be sharing with you three turkey themed STEM lessons that you can do with your students of all ages.

They are low prep, they're a lot of fun. You can do these lessons as a whole group experience, or even if you want to mix it up as STEM stations, or do a little bit of both. And at the end, I actually have a bonus activity that this is actually what I'm going to be doing the week of Thanksgiving.

And so wait till the end because you get the three lessons I'm going to share and then that bonus all three of these turkeys STEM lessons I'm going to be mentioning go along with books. And you can find these books at your local library, on Amazon, or maybe you already have them in your classroom. And I will make sure to link those in the show notes.

The first STEM and stories lesson to try in your classroom that goes along with turkeys is going with the story The Great Turkey Race. And this is actually a funny book. Some of the kids actually might start laughing because the turkeys are gonna realize Oh, no, we are going to be Thanksgiving dinner.

And kids might put that connection. Oh, we're eating a turkey that was alive. But anyway, it's a funny book.

And I'm gonna spoil the story for you. But the turkeys are trying to escape and race so that they're not going to be eaten. And what I like to do with this lesson, and I actually have a whole unit written for this that you can find in my TPT shop, Naomi Meredith.

But what's really fun is you're going to create some turkeys out of pom poms, the students can create them and glue the image of the turkey onto the pom pom, or maybe you have them pre created. And then students are going to build a fence using materials that you have, and then create a catapult that will launch the turkeys over the fence. So there are a lot of steps to this project.

So like I said, you definitely could do this as STEM stations, where one station is creating the turkeys, the next station is creating the fence. And then the next station is creating the catapult, which now that I'm saying this out loud, I think that's actually how I want to run this this week. So there you go.

Really fun story, fun lesson. And if you don't want the students taking the catapults home, one thing I like to do is when they clean up at the end of class, they actually have to carefully cut off the rubber bands. And they get really sad, they want to keep it but I don't want to deal with them launching other things in their classroom.

So up to you what you want to do with that. But that way you can reuse materials minus the rubber bands. So up to you.

The next story is really fun. There's a lot of variations of this story throughout the year. And I've actually been sending those to my niece and nephew who are in elementary school.

But this story is how to catch a turkey. And you can pretty much guess from the title, but they're trying to catch the turkey. And so after listening to the story, students can design a contraption that is safe that can actually catch the turkey for you know what.

But again, this could be a really fun way you can integrate this into your classroom. And the final turkeys seven stories lesson that you can try is goes along with the story turkey trouble. And for this one, students have to create a disguise for the turkey.

You can do this on paper and students can build on top of the paper turkey. Or if you had a robot that represents the turkey get turkey, they can disguise the turkey that way. Maybe you have turkey toys that you have purchased and they could create a design using 3d printing.

The possibilities are endless how complicated or what types of materials you want to use. But again, really fun. It adds in a lot of that art element, which almost all of my lessons have that let's be honest, I love that creativity piece.

Even though I say stem, everything that you do in STEM has that art piece anyway, because you want to be creative and add that really that fun and really visual element. So this one's really fun. And again, other possibilities.

And I promised you a bonus activity that you can try in your classroom. And this stem from, I was meeting all the kids in the school. So I had four different rotations, I told you, I just met all the kids.

And I wanted to get to know them. And so I was doing a lot of my usual back to school lessons with the students, but it was October. Because that's what it was like for me, I had the back to school teacher tired and setting up some of the routines and really trying to continue the ones that the teacher already has in place.

So that when she comes back, it's a lot easier. And so I played with them my all about me brick build, which has back to school themes, I changed up a couple questions. So it was relevant to where we were at.

And the kids really, really liked it. My students at my other school really, really liked it as well. These students did too.

So it really brought Hey, I should make a Thanksgiving themed one. So a couple of you have already grabbed it from my TPT shop. But it's the newest item in my shop.

It's a Thanksgiving themed all about me brick build. There are questions that are Thanksgiving theme that a lot of people typically do during this time. And so if it's true about them, such as do you like mashed potatoes? If this is true about the student, they're going to get the matching Lego bricks that are listed on the screen.

So for that question, do you like mashed potatoes, then they have to get one yellow Lego brick. If it's not true about them, they just wait for the next question. And I mix it up where they're gonna probably say yes to a lot.

But it's definitely up to them what shade of Lego or the size later on in the lesson and actually talks about counting the studs or the bumps on the top and adding in that mathematical piece in a low entry point way. And so it's really fun to get the kids talking. And then they can build with the Lego bricks that they collect along the way.

And then at the end, they can create a final design with all the pieces that they collected. For me those two days of Thanksgiving week, I actually want to see the whole school. So I have 24 different classes.

And my classes are 45 minutes long. So I'm going to start with one class. So let's say I'm teaching third grade, my third grade class is going to come to me for the first 20 minutes, then I'm going to switch with the art teacher and we're going to switch classes.

So I'll see that her class for 20 minutes. So I'm this will happen for two days. So Monday, Tuesday.

So within two days, I'm going to teach this lesson 24 times. So I better have this memorized at least by the third time. So easy to prep if you have a bunch of mixed Lego bricks, that lesson is good for you.

And all of the questions are made and ready to go and have some visuals. I hope you like these fun Turkey and Thanksgiving STEM lesson ideas. Let me know in my DMS what you think at Naomi Meredith on Instagram or TikTok, or write a YouTube comments.

I would love to hear from you and hope you have a great holiday.