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Cultivating Wonder with STEM
Me and my siblings in our Sunday best. I'm on the far left, being fascinated with whatever is in my bucket.
My most poignant childhood memories are when I lived in Alabama during my Kindergarten through third grade school years. The time frame -- the 1960s. Parenting styles were so different back then! My mom would send me and my two younger siblings out the door Saturday mornings after chores were done, and we'd come back for lunch, if we got hungry. Then we skirted outdoors again, not to return home until we realized it was getting dark! I lived on Quenby Drive in Montgomery, and at the time, all you could see across the street was pasture, and that was our playground. We ran through the fields, stopping at ponds and mud puddles to skip stones or to play with the tadpoles. We smashed rocks open with other rocks. We pulled petals from wildflowers. We dug for worms in the red dirt. We peeled the bark from trees to peer behind it at the miniature world of moving critters. We sweated, drank water from hoses, skinned our knees, and muddied our hands. The best thing I remember is how we were naturally filled with curiosity and wonder. I can remember seeing the schools of tadpoles and wondering why those little fishies had legs. I didn't know they were going to become frogs!
Fast forward to the time my children were old enough to explore (late 1980s early 1990s). They lived in a tighter, narrower world, where they could only safely play in the front yard, the fenced back yard, or the cul-de-sac of our expansive neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina. They most often chose the latter because the yards were boring places of tightly mowed grass with little life, thanks to ChemLawn. Playing in the cul-de-sac offered the best entertainment through either bicycles, roller skates, or basketballs. They ran and sweated--exercising their growing bones and muscles--but they had no place to dig, or explore, or wonder. Even if they wandered beyond our cul-de-sac, they found only more cement, more manicured lawns, and more fences. They did not grow up with wonder the way I did. I had to purposefully make opportunities for their connections to nature.
The stories for most children today who live in suburban or urban communities are similar to my children's childhood stories. No free roaming, no ponds to dig in. Nowadays, what is lost has to be found, and wonder comes mostly from given opportunities. In my experience, schools are places that can give awe and cultivate wonder. I say "can" because so many do not. You must find a teacher or a school culture dedicated to inquiry and willing to teach beyond the scripts to offer that to children today. I took that journey when I became an elementary school teacher after my children were grown. It is there, within the walls of my second grade classroom, that I began to relish bringing wonder to children. I learned that the absolute best way to do this is through integrated, cross-disciplinary units that mix together literacy, science, technology, math, social studies, music, art, and even engineering (which seems like something reserved for rocket scientists but is actually readily available to young children). That's STEM (or STEAM), and I hope to encourage more teachers to experiment with it by providing ideas and offering a forum for discussion, here, on STEM K-3: Cultivating Wonder. Reader, I invite you into this world of teaching because I know it is so good for our students and it is possible! Let's go!
Fast forward to the time my children were old enough to explore (late 1980s early 1990s). They lived in a tighter, narrower world, where they could only safely play in the front yard, the fenced back yard, or the cul-de-sac of our expansive neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina. They most often chose the latter because the yards were boring places of tightly mowed grass with little life, thanks to ChemLawn. Playing in the cul-de-sac offered the best entertainment through either bicycles, roller skates, or basketballs. They ran and sweated--exercising their growing bones and muscles--but they had no place to dig, or explore, or wonder. Even if they wandered beyond our cul-de-sac, they found only more cement, more manicured lawns, and more fences. They did not grow up with wonder the way I did. I had to purposefully make opportunities for their connections to nature.
The stories for most children today who live in suburban or urban communities are similar to my children's childhood stories. No free roaming, no ponds to dig in. Nowadays, what is lost has to be found, and wonder comes mostly from given opportunities. In my experience, schools are places that can give awe and cultivate wonder. I say "can" because so many do not. You must find a teacher or a school culture dedicated to inquiry and willing to teach beyond the scripts to offer that to children today. I took that journey when I became an elementary school teacher after my children were grown. It is there, within the walls of my second grade classroom, that I began to relish bringing wonder to children. I learned that the absolute best way to do this is through integrated, cross-disciplinary units that mix together literacy, science, technology, math, social studies, music, art, and even engineering (which seems like something reserved for rocket scientists but is actually readily available to young children). That's STEM (or STEAM), and I hope to encourage more teachers to experiment with it by providing ideas and offering a forum for discussion, here, on STEM K-3: Cultivating Wonder. Reader, I invite you into this world of teaching because I know it is so good for our students and it is possible! Let's go!
