Second Grade STEM Learning Environment

A STEM learning environment is very beneficial to students, particularly second-grade students during practicum lessons. To make the practicum classroom a STEM learning environment, one needs to connect, integrate, and unify different subjects and skills in lessons, view students’ literacy from multiple dimensions, integrate technology into learning, and empower students to be creative and make decisions related to their learning.

Making the practicum class a STEM learning environment demands that the teacher connects, integrates, and unifies their subjects with STEM lessons and skills. For instance, a second-grade teacher could be teaching English and they can unify and integrate lessons from science to allow students to make connections across disciplines (Wood, Jones, Stover & Polly, 2011). An example of integration is integrating the arts into an engineering project and allowing students to learn engineering concepts while practicing their arts and creativity (Cook, Bush & Cox, 2017). Teachers should view their students from multiple learning dimensions including reading, listening, writing, speaking, and visual representation, and provide their students with multiple opportunities to practice these skills during STEM practicum lessons and other subjects such as the arts.

Teachers also need to integrate technology into their STEM classrooms to give students a chance to practice their lessons while also gaining skills related to other learning dimensions such as visual representation (Cook, Bush & Cox, 2017). Finally, teachers need to empower students to be creative and make decisions regarding their learning. This can be achieved by providing students with various options on the roles they can take up in class or providing them with various types of assignments they can choose from (Cook, Bush & Cox, 2017). This increases their participation, while also improving their creativity.

References

Cook, K., Bush, S., & Cox, R. (2017). From STEM to STEAM: Incorporating the arts in a roller coaster engineering project.

Wood, K., Jones, J., Stover, K., & Polly, D. (2011). STEM literacies: Integrating reading, writing, and technology in science and mathematics. Middle School Journal, 43(1), 55-62.