Our middle school and the elementary school next door are becoming a STEM themed K-8 program. We are weaving STEM concepts into our entire curriculum. This is the first of its kind in our district. To incorporate reading and the arts into our STEM curriculum we are building a STREAM community (STEM + Reading and Arts). This project will unify our teachers, parents, community, and students as we participate in creating and using this stream and come together a team. We are building a solar powered waterfall/pond/stream in the courtyard of our campus. This stream will be a beautiful outdoor classroom that can be used for every subject area and will provide a water source for the birds we are encouraging to nest on our campus. The acronym STREAM represents science, technology, reading, engineering, arts, and mathematics. The STREAM will unite us and be used to show the connections between the disciplines and grade levels.
The goal of the stream is to integrate STEM activities into every classroom and to unite our campuses and teachers in collaborative planning of activities. Teachers in all subject areas will meet monthly to plan STREAM lessons.
Our teachers have already began planning to use the stream in art to draw, paint, and photograph, in language arts as the subject of descriptive writing and poetry, in social studies to study the effects of technology of water wheels and irrigation, in math using data collected to create graphs, scatter plots, and linear equations including the voltage, amperage etc. of the solar panel output In science the stream will be used for data collection of water chemistry and temperature, effects of runoff, collecting data/sampling of birds and other wildlife that visits or moves in, studying solar power, building water wheels, and more. In Engineering students will explain how solar power works and create strategies for improving the function of the stream. Students will design and build water wheels.