This year Pinewood students have been participating in a new special class.  Along with physical education, art, music, and Spanish students are doing STEM.  STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  STEM has been one of the quickest growing career fields and recent studies have shown a large demand for workers in these fields.  We want to ensure all of our kindergarten through sixth grade students are getting a strong foundation in these critical thinking skills to help prepare them to take on more rigorous courses in the Jr. High, High School, and post secondary opportunities.

The STEM curriculum has been very engaging for our students.  They are exploring what STEM is and using a design inquiry process to solve “real world” problems.  An example of one of the problems the students have solved is to design a corn maze for a local farm.  Another problem they have worked to solve his how high of a tower could they design with limited resources.  During these activities students are often in groups working on team building skills and communication skills.

Students reading a story about setting up a problem needing to use wind to create energy

Reading as a pair

Creating a paper slide show on what STEM means

Designing a tower

Team work

I encourage you to take sometime to find out more about the Jenison STEM program, it has been a great addition to our already top of the line academic programs.