STEM Overview Term 1
STEM
Wishing you all a warm welcome to STEM! I hope you're all as excited as I am to delve into some hands-on learning, with STEM becoming a specialist subject at St. Joseph’s this year!
The children have been getting familiar with our STEM space in the multipurpose room. Each class will have STEM once a fortnight with me in the multipurpose room. We've revised our rules and expectations to ensure that we can maintain a safe and engaging learning environment.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths so we will be focusing on lots of integrated learning and developing skills such as problem-solving, analysing, communication and digital literacy.
This term, we have started by focusing on the foundation of the scientific method.
In junior classes, we made a lava lamp and predicted what would happen (our hypotheses) when we added each ingredient to the jar. The students were amazed at how the colourful bubbles floated up and sunk down as they released carbon dioxide. We talked about density and how this reaction might have happened.
In senior classes, we put our engineering brains to the test to make paper rockets, focusing on the design elements and testing what might work best for distance and accuracy. The students loved lining up and testing them to see which rocket went the furthest.
STEM Award
One student from each class will receive a STEM award and prize at the end of each term. These awards will be given to students who consistently display the STAR values during STEM lessons. Along with a certificate, there will be a STEM prize to encourage problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
Here is an overview of what we will be focusing on for Term One:
| ALL | Class expectations Scientific method Junior - lava lamps Senior - paper rockets |
| Prep - Year 1 | Code & Go robot mouse - sequencing to move around a maze |
| Year 2 - Year 3 | Use Makey Makey equipment and connect circuits |
| Year 4 - Year 6 | Construct and program Jimu robot |
STEM Captains
Congratulations to our Year Six STEM Captains for 2024: Sophie, Oscar, Seb and Jackson. This will be a busy and exciting role for our captains and they are already enthusiastic about promoting and practising STEM throughout our school community. We have started the term with our STEM captains helping out with our lava lamp experiment with both Prep classes.
Community Links
We are delighted to be joining forces with Dr. Ayse Zengin from CSIRO, who is the Head of the Bone and Muscle Research Group at Monash University. She is an expert in musculoskeletal imaging and is keen to share her wealth of knowledge (and possibly some impressive 3D scans) with us. We will finalise dates for Dr Ayse to visit the school, where she will work closely with me and the senior students at St. Joseph’s.
Edel Cleere
STEM & Performing Arts teacher
edel.cleere@sjmalvern.catholic.edu.au
