“We can’t reach the top to make it bigger!” says Rowan with a giggle.

“Can we stand on this table to make our tower taller?” Linnea pleads.

Four-year-olds Rowan and Linnea have taken over the front foyer of our early childhood center for some serious block play. This bustling area will soon be filled with parents picking up their children—and the heavy traffic will no doubt send this tower crashing to the ground.

But who among us can resist a great tower-building moment?

Early childhood is a unique developmental period when children are learning how to learn. They follow their own interests and have their own ways of looking at things. As Rowan and Linnea stack and fit the blocks together, they are stepping into the world of math and engineering.

“Go really slowly,” Linnea cautions as she watches Rowan add another block to the tower. The room grows still as we all hold our breath. These two math and engineering mavens have engaged in enough block play to know that it takes concentration and a gentle touch to place a block on a tower with precision and dexterity.

Years of block play have helped the girls develop visual-motor skills, eye-hand coordination and fine-motor skills. They are well aware of the concept of cause and effect—and they know that one false move will send this tower crashing to the floor.

This late-afternoon block party is also strengthening the girls’ spatial skills. Strong spatial skills are tied to math skills! Research  shows that spatial reasoning skills are the best predictors of whether children will excel in STEM-related careers in adulthood. Spatial skills are especially important in STEM careers related to heating and plumbing systems, medical imaging, and engineering homes and buildings.

For all of these reasons, it’s important to give early learners like Rowan and Linnea ample time for extended block play.

“I think it’s going crooked,” says Linnea. “Can you move those two blocks over this way a little bit? But be careful!”

I watch as they collaborate and experiment with direction and observe the outcomes of their building efforts. They learn about mass, weight and proportionality as they plan and predict outcomes.

These girls are developing concepts in engineering as they design, build and test their solutions through their play. Making observations, asking questions and gathering information are all part of problem-solving. 

Problem-solving is the work of engineers! You won’t see early learning standards for engineering, but we often see engineering concepts referred to within the science and mathematical standards and benchmarks. 

More friends stop by to encourage this engineering duo and share in the communication and cooperation that is taking place as the tower grows taller. The children jointly decide where each block should go and then pass the blocks to Rowan, who has been tasked with the actual construction of the tower because she is the tallest child in the group.

Preschool-aged children need opportunities to be social and learn together with their friends. Important life skills such as taking turns, sharing and being patient are developing during these early social interactions.

As parents begin to arrive for pickup, I notice some two-year-olds in the actual block area creating their own version of stacked blocks. This is the mentoring that makes our teachers’ hearts burst with joy. This is what happens when children of different ages share an early learning environment. This is what happens when we educators resist the urge to say “no” when children want to build a block tower in a high-traffic area at an inconvenient time. If we let them lead their own play, children will create their own learning opportunities—often in the final moments of their preschool day!

In 2016, I had the honor of being an Early Career Fellow for the Fred Rogers Center.  In this role, my charge was to develop a concept for an application that brought art, communication, and language together.  This open-ended application invites children of many ages to create stories independently or collaboratively without having to have their co-creator sitting next to them.  Once a child creates an illustration, they can record a narration and send it to a buddy.  Their buddy receives the illustration, listens to the narration and then can make any changes they want to the illustration as well as their own narration and send it back (up to ten exchanges). Take a look at this video for a quick tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Qqqph7Ta0

This application is currently available for iPad only.  There is an update in progress which includes adding the color brown to the crayon selections. Price: Free

One of most popular opponent views to technology in early childhood is that is isolates children from other children and valuable social experiences.  One of my goals with this application was to an experience where children can be creative together without having to be sitting next to each other.  Soon after this application was released I was overjoyed to see my 3-year-old daughter Lydia co-creating a scene with her cousin Jaelyn who lives in Appleton, WI. Their scene included all sorts of items, similar to an I Spy scene.  Jaelyn’s challenge to Lydia was to find 4 apples that she added to her illustration.  Lydia was then to circle those apples.  From there is turned into finding other characters that were added.

In this experience Lydia was able to meaningful engage with her cousin in a both creative and mathematical experience.  If we were to pull apart the skills exercised here, Jaelyn, who was five years old at the time had to come up with the challenge, identifying the specific number of items she chose, and then strategically place them in the illustration.  Lydia then had find those items and keep track of how many she had found as she observed the illustration.  Lydia then made an attempt to add her own items and assign Jaelyn the task of finding the items Lydia added.

In supporting children creating their own Number Challenges in ChromaKids, consider this approach to creating a plan:

1. Who do you want to send the challenge to?
2. What characters would you like to include?
3. What are the items you would like to hide?
4. How many items would you like to hide?
   1. Will there be more than one item?
   2. How many of each item?
5. How will your buddy let you know that they have found the items?
   1. A circle around them?
   2. A square around them?
   3. An audio recording telling where they are?
6. What will you say when you make the audio recording of your challenge?
   1. How will you make sure you include the full directions for your buddy?

You will be amazed to see what children can come up with.  Don’t forget to join in on the fun in creating these challenges!

The essence of STEAM-based learning is integration. While I knew there were certain skills I wanted to teach students the content to teach those skills was wide open. I can still clearly remember the overwhelming feeling I had my first year teaching STEAM — so many options, what to cover. That first year I had students working on iPads way more then I would have liked. They became my crutch. So much so that the next year I challenged myself to limit iPad usage with students to 25% of my teaching time with them. But what to teach when I didn’t have any specific content?

When collaborating with colleagues my first instinct is to listen. Whenever I was able to attend a grade level meeting I just wanted to hear what they were doing. In doing all that listening I was able to find opportunities to assist with an activity that was either something they had always done and struggled with. For example, second grade students in social studies have a unit that looks at the the areas of our city and how our neighborhood has changed over the years. They learn about residential, commercial, industrial, recreational and services available in our city. In math they are doing some measurement and establishing a number line. What was the “Measuring for the Art Show” unit became Measuring for our Cardboard City. Measuring poster board of different sizes that would be the “land plot” students would build on. This project has grown into the main project of the year for students. But it all started with my helping make the connection between the math unit and the building project they had students do.

 Each student builds a building or space for the city. In the culminating activity they arrange their buildings/places to make up the Second Grade Cardboard City. This project connects to a social studies unit, a math unit, art skills and of course, STEAM.

Not only should you listen for things people are struggling with, but also keep an ear out for an idea they have but didn’t know where to start. Our school librarian does this big unit with first grade students that starts as an exploration between fact and opinion. The culminating project in the past was students reading a picture book biography about a famous person or animal. They find three facts and one opinion about the person or animal they read about and did a guessing activity. She wanted students to do something more but couldn’t figure out what. I stumbled upon the idea of turning a water bottle into what we call Biography Bottles. This idea continued with recycling theme (something first grade focuses on throughout the year). After reading their picture book biography students used a reference photo and a wealth of other materials to turn their bottle into a representation of their person or animal.

               Biography Bottles created by first grade students as part of a Library and STEAM project.

Besides listening there are three more tips I suggest in getting classroom teachers, and other school colleagues to join in on the STEAMy fun:

1. Attend any grade level and/or planning meetings you can. Focus on just listening to find those projects or ideas that you can help expand. After you start working on a project remember that collaborative work requires so much communication. Even if you are doing a project that you’ve done before, you never know what ways you might be able to innovate without hearing what else is going on.

1. Invite people to come see what you are doing. As a specialists teacher I’m often teaching solo. It can feel a little like being a salesperson, but if you want people to be involved or excited about what you are doing they need to see what is happening.

1. Give colleagues a chance to play with materials too. At least once a year I host a faculty meeting where I challenge colleagues to one of the design challenges I give to students or a new one that I’m trying to test out.  Just as students love having time in the day to create with their hands in an open-ended, problem-solving way, teachers too appreciate that time.

Good luck! And remember, communication and listening will be your best tools in getting colleagues to collaborate.