STEM Resources

Help your children understand the basics of hydraulic mechanisms with this amazing S.T.E.M. Learning D.I.Y. project!

Hydraulic Machines use the power of water pressure to carry out specified tasks. From cranes to braking mechanisms, hydraulic power finds widespread use in daily life.

One of the coolest Smartivity STEM Learning Educational D.I.Y. Toy Kits, the Smartivity Pump It Move It Hydraulic Crane introduces children to the fundamentals of hydraulic machines in the most playful and engagement filled manner.

The kit contains all the elements essential to build a fully-functional hydraulic crane, richly-illustrated and easy-to-understand step-by-step Instruction booklet and tools to embellish the project once built.

Once assembled, children can use their Hydraulic Cranes to life objects and move them around. The project assembly provides at least an hour-long engagement and the game-play ensures that children proudly continue to play with the project even after.

STEM Seasonal Challenges for grades 2-5 provides a fun way to enhance STEM learning in the classroom. This boxed set includes 30 challenge cards—each card is seasonally- or holiday-themed. Designed to capture a student's attention, challenges are diverse, simple, and easy to complete and include these fun activities: creating pumpkin catapults, making elf zip lines, designing pool floatation devices, and more!

Help students go full STEAM ahead with festive grab-and-go activities! Seasonal STEM Challenges offers an engaging way to get students interested in science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Each challenge card features two sides—the front side includes the challenge and a visual list of materials needed to complete the challenge. The back of the card is ideal for extended learning and includes hints, questions, and explanations of the science behind the challenge. Each activity uses common materials and can be completed individually or during whole-class instruction.

STEM Challenges helps teachers integrate STEM into the classroom by providing hands-on activities that appeal to students. Because of the child-friendly text and the visual materials lists, these easy, but fun, activities can be completed independently, in small groups, or as a whole-class activity. The activities require common materials so students or teachers can "grab and go!” Don't forget to check out the STEM Challenges set for more fun ways to learn STEM.

Science, technology, engineering, art, and math work together to make learning fun in these STEAM lessons!

Perfect for Makerspace!

This kindergarten teacher resource book includes:

• A year's worth of teacher lesson plans
• STEAM design challenges that turn elementary students into inventors
• Easy-to-follow lesson format (with standards identified for each lesson)
• Classroom-tested lessons

The STEAM Design Challenges in this book follow engineering practices to teach students in kindergarten to solve a problem by designing, creating, and justifying their designs. They also allow art to support and enhance the learning of science and math while the engineering process is followed.

These engaging STEAM lessons:

• Integrate the Next Generation Science Standards and national standards from other disciplines
• Enhance learning across various disciplines
• Facilitate students in collaborating to solve real-world scenarios
• Promote critical thinking, analytical thinking, and reflective thinking
• Incorporate the Five Es Instructional Model (engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate)
• Are classroom tested

Engineering Design Process
The lessons in this book are intended to support the engineering design process in which teachers become a facilitator by encouraging and guiding students to work as a team to find a creative solution to a real-world problem without providing step-by-step instructions. Students are inspired to act as scientists and engineers through the use of sketches, diagrams, mathematical relationships, and literacy connections. By creating their very own models and products based on background information from their studies, students are immediately engaged through a meaningful, rewarding lesson.

More about the lessons
Each lesson begins by presenting students with a design challenge scenario in order to immediately excite students with a real-world situation that they are on a mission to solve. Students are then given a dilemma, mission, and blueprint design sheet and are asked to collaborate with team members to create several prototypes. Students present their prototypes to their teacher, construct their design, test their design, engage in a class discussion about their design, and then modify their design. Finally, teams create a justification piece in order to sell their new prototype (ex. persuasive letter, video, advertisement etc.).

About the Authors
The Steam Dreamers, a group of four classroom teachers, desired to create more interactive learning environments and science classrooms through student-centered problem-solving lessons. They created this collection of cross-curricular design challenge lessons to provide teachers and students with real-world scenarios that are driven by core learning standards and enriched through the inclusion of literacy and the arts.