HOMESCHOOL CO-OP: STEM Day

An up-close look at the golden shimmer on a $20 bill!

For our first co-op session, our leader organized a STEM day with various stations for the kids to explore. For anyone who is not familiar with the STEM acronym, it stands for “science, technology, engineering, and math,” and it’s a huge focus of education these days because there are so many careers within those fields. There were many memorable aspects to the day, most notably a high quality microscope station for the kids to look at samples of a hair, salt, sugar and a bee’s wing! (Did you know that bees have hair on their wings?) The station was led by a grandfather who also had a desktop linked to his iPhone on macro-mode so we could take an up-close look at our fingers and a $20 bill! A fun fact we learned is that $20 bills actually have gold-colored glitter on them!! This makes it more challenging to create counterfeit bills. He also played clips of various single-celled organisms such as amoebas, which were very amusing to watch as they crept across the screen with their pseudopodia (false feet) in a very bloopy way.

Even the littlest ones had fun with the microscope!

Other stations included a “sink or float” prediction table, a snap circuit kit, a demonstration of a “tornado in a bottle”, and some building rods with prompts such as “make a 3-D shape” or “make something you can wear.” Juni especially had fun with the “build something taller than yourself” prompt, and she worked determinedly to complete it with some assistance from Willow and me. I loved seeing the deep focus that the kids had as they settled into their building projects! Many of them continued to build even as we were cleaning up!