STEM- What's been happening in class?
A Snapshot From the STEM Lesson in the Foundation Classroom
This week, our Foundation learners had a wonderful time spelling their names using alphabet beads! Each child tried to use their name card and had a selection of letter beads, then set to work finding and threading each letter onto a piece of string — in order — to create their very own bead name.
The room was beautifully focused during this session. Students helped each other find tricky letters, celebrated when they finished, and were incredibly engaged from start to finish. It was a genuine reminder that young learners thrive when learning is connected to something personally meaningful. Watching five-year-olds hunt carefully through a pile of letters to find just the right one is a delight — and a powerful reminder of how much learning happens through doing.
Little Coders: ScratchJr in the Classroom with 1/2
Students have been working through hands-on coding challenges — from making a character walk and pause, to navigating a maze, to programming two characters to react to each other. Each project builds a new concept: sequences, loops, events, and messaging. If you'd like to try it at home, search ScratchJr in your app store (free on iPad and Android). Ask your child to show you how to make the cat move — and let them be the teacher!
Crafting & Creativity: Hand Puppet Making Students have also been getting hands-on with a wonderfully creative craft challenge — making their own hand puppets! Choosing between colourful collage monsters or black-and-white safari animals (lion, elephant, zebra, leopard, and rhino), students followed a multi-step design process to cut, fold, and assemble their puppets from card. The monster makers selected and arranged collage pieces — eyes, horns, arms, and textures — to give their creatures a unique personality, while the safari animal makers used felt-tip pens to colour and bring their animals to life before construction.
Once assembled, the puppets really came alive! Students used them to introduce characters, retell stories, and chat with a partner's puppet — building both creativity and confidence in speaking and listening. The activity links directly to our Design and Technologies curriculum, with students making real design decisions and practising safe tool use along the way. Keep an eye out for these characters coming home — your child will be very keen to put on a show!
Coding, Crafting & Seahorses — STEM in Action!
This week in STEM, students in year 3-6 put their inner programmers to the test with our Hama Beads Pixel Art challenge. Working from their STEM booklets, students designed their own pixel art images on a coordinate grid, then wrote a step-by-step bead program using (column, row, colour) instructions — just like the code a computer follows. The twist?
Once their designs were locked in, students transferred them bead by bead onto a physical Hama board — turning their written code into a real, tangible object. The fused designs will be coming home soon.
The next challenge: a beaded wire seahorse. Threading tiny beads onto wire using a two-wire technique, students will learn follow a numbered instruction sheet to build their seahorse row by row — starting with the snout and working their way down to the curling tail. It's fiddly, it's satisfying, and it's a beautiful example of how following a precise sequence of instructions (sound familiar?) produces something remarkable.
Ask your child: "What does writing a bead program have in common with writing code?" You might be surprised by the answer.
