It’s engaging! It’s interactive! It’s the inquiry- based IVDU Long Island Elementary STEM program, which was designed by CIJE (The Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education). This year, Mrs. Karr’s class at IVDU has been excited to participate in many learning opportunities to explore engineering and design concepts and to learn about the properties of different materials. Since the beginning of the year, students have tested different shapes to determine which are the most stable to use for building structures. They experimented with cup towers, spaghetti towers, and paper tube structures. They built and tested wooden bridges that were strong enough to hold at least 49 blocks!
Currently, the class is studying the properties of water. They learned to use pipettes to transfer water, measured the amount of drops of water that can fit on a penny. They also observed how placing soap in water can cause objects inside the water to move in different ways.
Mrs. Karr has greatly benefited from the biweekly mentorship of Yafa Lamm from CIJE. Yafa reviews the student progress in detail and ensures that the activities are tailored and adapted to meet the students’ needs and interests.
Through Yafa’s guidance, the students are gaining many important skills. Since the activities are student driven with multiple possible outcomes, the students learn to utilize creative thinking, take risks, handle frustration when an idea does not work out right away, and view failure as the first step of learning. They are also learning how to organize the materials needed and correctly follow procedures to perform an activity. For certain activities, there are limits placed on materials or time and students are learning to work within these limits. These skills are then applied and generalized within other areas of the curriculum.
The STEM program is just one aspect of the engaging, individualized, and interactive IVDU Long Island curriculum.