For those who love Bethany Barton’s, I’m Trying To Love Spiders, and have a favorite pollination/bee unit, this book is for you! One of my favorite STEM lessons involves the use of the picture book What If There Were No Bees by Suzanne Slade. In that lesson, after reading the book, students choose a flower image, color it, and position it in their team’s “field”. They then use our BeeBots to practice their coding skills; getting the bees to pollinate each flower. This picture book would be such a wonderful addition to this lesson, setting the stage for more of the STEM pollination activities listed below! Featured Picture Book:
Give Bees A Chance (2017) By Bethany Barton (awesomebARTon on Twitter) Illustrated by Bethany Barton Summary: The author tries to convince her bee-phobic friend how valuable bees are. Through humor, clever illustrations, and fun facts sprinkled throughout the pages, kids will learn so many interesting things about bees. Including the process bees go through from nectar to honey – who knew? Related Themes and Standards: SEL: Respecting nature Facing fears Communicating effectively Science: Animal Adaptations Pollination All kinds of bee facts STEM Ideas: 1. Use these clipart flowers to conduct the Beebot lesson mentioned above. 2. If you have access to LEGO 2.0 kits, have students conduct the plant pollination build. Or if you have LEGO Spike Essentials here’s a similar pollination build lesson. 3. This Pinterest Board by Beth Sharkey has some fun pollination STEM activities. 4. Have your kids use Scratch or ScratchJr to code a bee going on one of the missions related to the story. 5. Being a HUGE fan of SciShow Kids, I love this video which not only teaches about bees but has a great project to make a Bee House using recycled items! You could have your students build this exact one (would be a great team project) or engineer their own using other materials. You could then locate their bee houses around the school campus and have ongoing observation/data-collecting trips to see how they are doing! 6. Here is a great lesson to have your students engineer a 3D model of a beehive using toothpicks and mini marshmallows. If you have access to Tinkercad, you could take it a step further and have them practice digital modeling of a beehive! Have them screenshot their build and add it to a Padlet wall so they can see each other’s, or if you have lots of filament, print them out! 7. If you have access to a drone, create "flowers" using colored spots and have your students either free fly from the flowers back to the "hive" or kick it up a notch and have them use DroneBlocks to code an autonomous drone flying mission.
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To say I absolutely love the book featured in this post is an understatement! The Baddies is by the same author as Room on the Broom – Julia Donaldson. I’m sure many of you reading this have some favorite Room on the Broom engineering; it is perfect for integrating the engineering design process with our youngest STEMsters. The Baddies is just as entertaining and lends itself nicely to some engineering challenges as well! Because of its hysterical characters, embedded onomatopoeia, and fun rhyme scheme, I’m definitely ordering this one for my personal collection! Featured Picture Book:
The Baddies (2022) By Julia Donaldson Illustrated by Axel Scheffler Summary: Three “baddies,” a troll, a witch, and a ghost, are overheard bragging about their “badness” by a little mouse who challenges them to a contest to steal a little girl’s hanky. They each give it their best shot, only to be outsmarted by the little girl who ends up giving her hanky to the little mouse to keep her family warm. Related Themes and Standards: SEL: Kindness Humor ELA: Rhyming words Onomatopoeia Character traits Science: Friction (if you do the hovercraft activity mentioned below) STEM Ideas: 1. Engineer a way to get a hanky from one spot to another without touching it. (You can get cheap handkerchiefs at most dollar stores, or you can order a dozen HERE) 2. If you have access to drones, have students engineer an attachment to transport the girl's hanky to a safe location. 3. Since one of the characters was a ghost, have students design and engineer a hovercraft that would carry a hanky from one spot to another. Science Buddies has a nice lesson HERE or this one HERE uses paper plates instead. Better yet, show your kids this video, provide lots of different materials and let THEM figure it out through the engineering design process! 4. The bridge in the story didn’t hold the troll very well. Have students engineer a bridge and test it to see what the maximum weight the troll could be. 5. The kids will laugh at the little girl’s toffee flying out of her pocket and getting stuck on the witch’s nose. Create a simple cardboard witch and have students engineer catapults or other inventions to launch “toffee” at the witch’s nose. (You could add velcro or two-sided tape to the witch’s nose and the kids could launch cotton balls or small pompoms to represent the toffee.) 6. In the end, the little girl gives her hanky to the mouse family for a blanket. Have students brainstorm other uses for a hanky and create a promotional video demonstrating the new use using Canva, Flip, or another video creation platform. Have you used this book to integrate STEM? I'd love to hear about it! #BetterTogether Since retiring, I've been spending a lot more time working to improve my craft as a picture book writer. This includes connecting with a lot of the children's writing community online. Having been in education my entire life, this new world of traditional publishing: querying agents, learning from editors, lurking as new online connections converse about the overwhelming process, has been very interesting! Last night when I saw others tweeting (yes, I will always call it that!) about Susanna Leonard Hill's 2023 Holiday Writing Contest, I knew I had to give it a shot (my first writing contest ever)! The theme this year is Holiday Countdown so the piece had to include counting something down. The hardest part was reducing my first draft to the 250 word limit, especially while trying to keep the rhyme and meter as tight as possible. Some of that smoothness was sacrificed, but lesson learned! Those of you who know me, know I am passionate about integrating relevant STEM at the elementary level! So you KNOW I had to include a drone in my entry! As I wrote Devoted Drone Deliveries, I thought back to missions our GLIDE girls had done over the years and how it is so important for girls to see themselves represented in drone education and the drone industry. I knew the main character had to be one of the most caring and amazing young drone pilots I'd had the pleasure to teach, Jordan. As a side note, the importance of growing this representation and elementary drone integration is exactly why I am so honored to be part of the curriculum team at Drone Legends! They share that passion! So anyway! Here is my debut writing contest entry! Enjoy!
Devoted Drone Deliveries Jordan loves the people who live in her neighborhood! Holidays are here again and so to do some good… She wants to use her trusty drone to give each house a gift, that way she’ll stay anonymous and spirits she will lift! House number 10, Mr. Frost works down at the deli. To him, she gives some homemade bread and jar of apple jelly. Number 9, Mrs. Green, a mom with seven kids, her gift is cookies, sweetly baked in tins with matching lids. Number 8, on down the street, John and Jerry Knox, they work out in the cold all day their gifts, knitted socks. Number 7 is the place the Lopez family lives. They always wave and shout hello, a smiley flag she gives. Number 6, Grandpa Frank, although he’s not related, he’s loved by everyone around his gift, art she created. Number 5, with fading paint belongs to Captain Smoots, he works hard daily catching fish; her drone delivers boots. Number 4, Mrs. Nell who has a bunch of cats, Jordan gives her treats and toys that look like little rats! Number 3 belongs to Ann who sleeps during the day, she works the night shift at the mill, for her, a big bouquet. Number 2, a tiny home owned by Officer Mark, a flashlight is his gift this year to help him in the dark. Number 1, the final stop is Jordan’s own home place. She views the pictures from the drone, smiles on EVERY face! |
Kim CollazoSTEM Advocate and Picture Book Author Archives
January 2025
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