Welcome back to school and 2020! I am sharing out six snowy winter STEM challenges. The holiday blues and insane cabin fever will be setting in soon, will you be ready? Hopefully these six STEM challenges will help you out. Try one each week! These are for all grades. Each link has modifications for older or younger students and extensions.

Jen Horst, Early Intervention Teacher, and her class will be receiving a "Holiday Bonus Present" - Jen wrote the winning essay for the December drawing of the Little Genius OSMO Kit. Congratulations and thank you for all you do for your students!

The Hour of Code takes place each year during Computer Science Education Week. The 2019 Computer Science Education Week will be December 9-15. We have some ideas for you to try out during this special week. These ideas will be shared on this Blog soon so you have time to see what can fit in your lessons that week. Please send me pictures of your students doing some lessons! I would love to see what great stuff is occurring in our IU13 classrooms. 

I am excited to announce we had FOUR winners for this month's Blog contest. Congratulations goes out to Sue Bowers, Headstart teacher at One Cumberland, Lisa Kiss, ES teacher at Fairland, and Andrea Peters, SLP therapist for all winning a Bee Bot. We had several staff members that sent in essays and we had a three way tie. Supervisors decided all three would receive a Bee Bot.

I would like to do a shout out to all our "2018-2019 Contest Blog Winners". These staff members wrote short essays to explain how they can implement the item I was giving away that month. Each month our IU13 Program Supervisors voted on the essays, not knowing who was the writer. I will begin the contests again in September, with the first essay being due in October.

Erin Sullivan was the winner of our final contest give away. She won a Snap Circuit Jr. Kit to use with her Speech and Language students. This kit allows students and staff to make up to 100 different experiments.  Erin is planning to incorporate these experiments during her sessions to work on vocabulary, problem solving, following directions, and many other IEP goals. Thank you Erin for the work you do with our students! 

This months' after-school tech help sessions will be canceled. These sessions were to be held on April 3rd (Lancaster) and April 4th (Lebanon). Please contact Lori Blantz or Hillary Holler if you need assistance before the last sessions in May (2nd & 7th). As a reminder, we are only holding the after-school tech help sessions if either Hillary or Lori is notified that you will be coming. Please notify us by the start of the week that the help sessions will be provided. Thank you.

The month of April will be my final ECSES Tech Item Contest. This contest is around coding, so I decided to have two items to win. One for the younger students and one for the older students. Although not all our students will grow up to be programmers, coding helps foster life skills such as learning how-to problem solve, overcome obstacles and collaborate with their peers which are lasting skills all people need to succeed in life. Coding builds important life skills that are challenging to cultivate in students with learning needs such as, organization, higher order thinking, self-esteem, socialization and teamwork, as well as sequencing, problem solving, math concepts, along with perseverance, so that they will become better readers, writers, and mathematicians. Most students with disabilities struggle with low self-esteem, and coding is an avenue that builds confidence in one’s ability to learn and create, and cultivate a sense of pride from producing their own original work. The first item for the younger students, the Learning Resources Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity turns coding into a hands-on analog activity for tactile and visual learners. The robot mouse is similar to the Bee Bot that was given away before. As the students learn to program they build key skills that include critical thinking, problem solving, sequencing, and programming fundamentals. This is geared to students abilities of 5 years old and up. The second item is called Snap Circuits Jr and you can create over 100 STEM projects using this Electronics Exploration Kit. This kit is geared for students abilities of 8+ with hands-on experience of building models of working electrical circuits. This kit has a color manual with visual pictures of creating different electronic projects. There is no soldering, no tools, it just snaps together to create items like a flashing light, adjustable-volume siren. This item has received the following awards: the National Parenting Center-Seal of Approval, Dr. Toy 100 best children's products, Dr. Toy best educational products, and is STEM approved for education. So check these items out and enter the final contest for the 2018-2019 school year. Thanks for all your work with our students.

Jessica Sweitzer won a BreakoutEDU box to use with her Speech and Language students. In her essay she shared that this year she had the opportunity to borrow BreakoutEDU boxes to use with a variety of her students. The students' excitement of reaching a shared goal became tangible. Watching everyone work together to solve problems and open actual locks to “win” was incredible. Her students continued to ask her on a weekly basis when is their next "breakout". Now she is so excited to have her own box! Thank you Jessica for the work you do with our students.

Hi Everyone! Hillary and I wanted to thank everyone so much for the wonderful donations for STEM. We have a had an overabundance of items received for this school year and no longer need any STEM donations. Check out our STEM donations!