Here are some Valentine STEM lessons. The first lesson focuses on balance. It came from a lesson I found online. For this lesson you need conversation heart candy, Dixie^© cups, and craft sticks.

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.