Morning Play and Golden Time

Each morning when we arrive early we play with our STEM boxes. Our STEM boxes and toys provide us with endless opportunities to use our imaginations, creativity, building skills, and fine motor skills. We work together or independently to build towers, domino tracks, people, patterns, and many other interesting creations. We have a wide variety of STEM based materials and toys to play with such as Plus Plus blocks, snowflakes, wooden blocks, dominoes, peg boards and pegs, pattern blocks, and cubes. We also play with our STEM toys during wet lunch breaks. Throughout the week, we earn minutes of Golden Time for good behaviour. On Friday afternoons just before home time we have our Golden Time. During this time we often choose to play with the STEM boxes and we also have access to additional STEM toys such as the drill and screwdriver shapes set, playdough, and marbles. We love building in Rang 1 and Rang 2!

Magnetic Maze STEM Challenge

In this STEM challenge we made our own magnetic mazes. We drew a maze on a piece of card, cut a character for our maze out of card, and added a paper clip to our character. We then used our magnetic wands to guide our character around the maze! We really enjoyed this activity and thought that our mazes were quite magical!

Unusual Buildings STEM Challenge

When we were learning about houses and homes we listened to the story 'Izzy Peck Architect' and watched a video of some of the world's most unusual homes. Múinteoir Caoimhe then put us into groups and gave each group a set of materials. We worked with our group to plan our building and to construct our very own unusual home. We were very proud of our buildings and enjoyed explaining the interesting features we had included to our teacher and friends!

Paper Cups STEM Challenge

Múinteoir Caoimhe set us a very tricky teamwork/STEM challenge. We had to work as a team to create a paper cup pyramid without touching the cups! We were given an elastic band and 3 pieces of string to use. It took us some trial and error to figure out a suitable way of all working together to build our pyramid. When we figured it out it was really easy and we could build the pyramid in no time!

Paper and Tape Towers

For our first STEM challenge of the year, Múinteoir Caoimhe gave us a bundle of paper and a roll of tape. We had to build a tower using only these materials. We worked with our group to plan our tower and then started to build. It was trickier than we thought but in the end we  made two tall towers!