Tied 2 Teaching Review

My kids are big fans of STEM Activities and love it when we can add projects into our homeschool. The last few weeks we have been using STEM Activities, Full Year of Challenges with Close Reading from Tied 2 Teaching.

If you’re not familiar with what STEM stands for it is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Using STEM is an amazing way to introduce them to these subjects and the concepts involved than having them create it for themselves. This is for grades 3rd through 6th. My kids are 7th and 10th grade and got a lot out of the activities.

STEM Activities, Full Year of Challenges with Close Reading comes as a compressed Zip File. Once you unzip the file it is available as a PDF file. The bundle is 859 MB with over 1,000 pages. Every STEM Design Challenge is downloaded separately in the bundle.

The bundle has a full year of STEM Activities that are broken down by month and are seasonal and holiday themed. Example in November you have: Parade Balloon Challenge, Thanksgiving Table Challenge, Cranberry Tower Challenge, and Pilgrim Shelter Challenge. The main holidays are covered in each of the months. Some of the seasonal themed challenges may be making a Marshmallow Snowman Challenge, and 100 Days of School Challenges. There is even several brick building challenges available. There are enough activities to do 1 activity per week each month throughout the year.

I LOVE that all the material with all the STEM Activities are items you have around the house or you can find at your local store. If you have to buy something the cost is very minimum like sugar cubes, tooth picks, frosting, bag of balloons, marshmallows, and craft sticks.

The format is laid out the same with each activity. It looks like each activity also has 21 pages with 16 pages dedicated exclusively to your project. There are a few variation like with the brick building challenges.

What does a typical lesson look like?

It starts out with a “Close Reading Passage.” Honestly, I had no clue what that term implied. You may already know the terminology so bare with me if you already know it. Basically in a nut shell it’s observation and interpretation between the reader and what is being read. It’s breaking down a passage and understanding it by asking question. That is a basic explanation. So what does that term have to do with this?

The Close Reading segment in all the STEM Activities links you to a website called Wonderopolis. You can also scan with a QR Scanner to get to the site. You are directed to the exact place. You don’t have to worry about searching for it when you are there.

 Example: My son did the Airplane Design Challenge. In the PDF we can go directly to the page. “How Do Airplanes Fly?” (It is recommended that you print out the passage.) This covers everything from gravity, thrust, lift, motion, friction, aerodynamics, Bernoulli Principal, Newton’s Law, and a few other things in a couple of paragraphs. The explanation is easy to understand and all the harder words have a definition if you hold your mouse over the word. For non-readers there is an audio tab to read it out loud. After you have read the passage it sets up the next portion of the assignment. 

After you have read the information on the website you have your first work sheet: Design Challenge Reading with Wonderopolis.

The worksheet is taken from what you read online. A few of them are multi-choice questions or you write a brief sentence answering the questions.

Here is my son’s completed worksheet on this portion.

The next page is the same as your cover page and is intended as a poster for your classroom.

The Challenge page -my son is going to make a wood airplane and there is a brief overview of the challenge. It gives you the basic information for your challenge.

STEM Design Challenge: Build an airplane. A full color page that gives you several pictures of designs other students have made. This is great for those kids who want a visual picture before they begin there challenge.

The next page has the full instructions of the activity and will be your guide as a teacher. Both of my kids where pretty independent with the challenges and they used this as their guide. 

The Brick Building Challenge has a different page from this format. It ask you, "What Blocks will You Need?"

I'll break down the steps for you.

Design Challenge with instruction on the Close Reading passage and questions from the Design Reading with Wonderoplois. There are a few variations on different challenges. 

This page breaks it up in several sections:

The next section is Design Criteria. For example: The pencil tower must be free standing and can’t lean against anything, nor can you hold it. You have to build it has high as you can. The final structure must support the weight of an apple at the top of the tower. The photo is from the Lincoln's Cabin Challenge

Material Suggestions will give you a list of the supplies needed to create your design.

Final Product Questions ends with questions that vary slightly in each activity. Example in the planes: What will you do to insure the majority of your project is made of wood? The last one asks, what makes yours unique from all the other planes?

The next worksheets are the same but different formats. The first STEM Activity Challenge we did both. After that we just ended up doing the first sheet each time. It has you answer 5 questions; ask, imagine, plan, create, and improve. 

Some of the following worksheets I'm putting my own interpretation of what to do with them. Several of them feel like they are the same in my opinion. I'm assuming this is for different grades. I like that I have a lot of wiggle room to adjust it in my homeschool.

I'm thinking this sheet would be better for younger kids and you can draw your answers. 

 The next worksheet also has the ask, imagine, plan, create, improve, and adds in the test question.

You can write or draw out your steps of you STEM Challenge. What did you do first? What was the next step? Then you did what? What was your last step?

A final assessment of your STEM Challenge. This is a great activity for critical thinking. They get to assess their project after it's all done. They can see what worked or what they would have done differently.

This worksheet I think would be best for older kids. It's basically the same as the previous worksheets but gives you more writing space for your answers in more details.

STEM worksheet lets you put all the concept you created using Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math down in one place.

If you are using this in a classroom you have a sheet to send home to the parents explaining what they did on the project. This would be nice for a co-op class too.

How did I use  STEM Activities, Full Year of Challenges with Close Reading in my homeschool?

 

After I downloaded the files and looked over a few of them myself. I decided to let my kids choose what projects they wanted to do.

My son is 13 and is very techie and hands on kid. My daughter is 16 with special needs and is obsessed with insects. 

My daughter zoomed in on the Design a Bug Build Block Challenge. At first that was the only one she wanted to do.

My son on the other hand picked out several activities to do: Design a Wooden Airplane Design Challenge, Design a Tin Foil Boat Challenge, Design a Sugar Cube Arch Challenge, and Design a Pencil Tower. I honestly didn’t think we would get to each one. He was pretty excited about it!

I printed out the activities we wanted to do.

I decided to print the ones the kids wanted to do. I went through the materials list on each one to see what I needed. I had everything except sugar cubes, and frosting.

We did one STEM Activity a week. The majority of them took no more than 30 minutes. 

Building Block Challenge

My daughter created two bug's

 

My daughter's assignment was to build a new and bizarre looking insect out of bricks to create a brand new insect species. 

Since reading and writing can be a bit of a challenge for her we did the worksheets orally.

She created a new stick bug and a new type of a lady beetle that had a larger head! As you can see from her entomology boxes she took it all pretty serious and had no problem imagining and creating something new and unique. That's every entomologist dream to find a new insect. 

My daughter went in a long explanation of newly discovered insects or ones that thought were extincted and found recently when I asked her what she thought. That tells me she liked it a lot!

 

Design a Tin Foil Boat is from the month of June.

Design a Tin Foil Boat with a single 12" x 18" sheet of foil you had to make a boat design that could hold the maximum amount of pennies without sinking. My son read the online information worked on his worksheets. When he started to build his boat his sister took part in the building portion of the challenge. He actually made a round, square, and a long boat design to see if one held more pennies than the other. He felt the round one was the best one. 

His sister just folded her boat tightly and plopped it in the water and started adding pennies. Her boat  ended up holding a lot more than all of his boats. He was a bit disappointed that she beat him!

Design a Wooden Airplane is from the month of July

Design a Wooden Airplane. My son spent a lot of time in this area with reading about airplanes. We are in the air capital of the world so planes are a huge thing here. He could make a plane out of masking tape. duct tape, craft sticks, toothpicks, and clothes pins. He could also use hot glue and scissors. He did the worksheets and read on the Wonderopolis and a few other sites.

He made a bi-plane and a commercial jet. The commercial jet really surprised me with what he came up with. Granted it didn't mention using a marker but, he wanted certain features to stand out. Then he created it to be free standing. The jet is still standing and pretty sturdy.

My son said, "This was my favorite challenge.  I  went out of the boundaries a bit  with the challenge but, I had a vision of what I wanted to make and had to take it out of the box some." "Airplanes aren't my favorite thing but, so many people work in the manufacturing of them out here and I know lots of people who build airplanes-so it was fun."

Design a Sugar Cube Arch is in the month of October

Design a Sugar Cube Arch was messy but fun. This was the longest challenge we did. My daughter had a bit of a hard time at first getting it to stay erect. After she figured it out she was able to complete her project. My son finished a lot faster and got bored waiting for her and ended up making statues as his is a Roman Arch and needed statues.

My son is doing one of his worksheet on the Design a Sugar Cube Arch.

Design a Pencil Tower is in the month of September 

Design a Pencil Tower. My son first was going to make his tower square but it keep slipping on him. He decided to make a triangle design. His only disappointment was that we didn't have enough of pencils for him to go up higher. (I have enough of pencils to last till the kids graduate!)

The kids had a lot of fun with everything we did. The program is pretty straight forward. Anyone can teach this that doesn't have any experience in the subjects covered. Its informative. I like that you have to use critical thinking skills. The variety of challenges is impressive and I like the themes around the holidays and seasonal challenges.

Overall we spent no more than 30 minutes with the exception of the Sugar Cube Arch. There are a few that I can see taking no more than an hour.

This is a neat STEM Activity curriculum that can be easily added into your homeschool, classroom, and would make a fun class in a homeschool co-op. 

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 Seventy of us are reviewing STEM Activities, Full Year of Challenges with Close Reading from Tied 2 Teaching. I'm going to take a look myself and see what others have done in their STEM Activities. Click on the graphic below.