In partnership with early childhood service providers and elementary school systems, the Children's Museum of the Lowcountry will expand the reach of its programming to share its hands-on, play-based approach to STEM education with targeted children and educators. The museum will create a Power of Play curriculum with lesson plans that reflect best practices and focus on play-based activities to teach STEM concepts tied to grade level and state standards. The museum will train and support 40 teachers and educators from ten Head Start/First Steps early childhood centers and ten Title I elementary schools, and provide them with free Pop Up Tinker Shop (a museum on wheels) outreach visits. The trainings will build teacher confidence, promote best practices for play-based learning, support a community of practice, and enhance young learners' engagement, fascination, and attitude towards STEM. The Power of Play Curriculum will be published as a bound resource and shared with other children's museums and service providers.
The Garfield Park Conservatory will launch a new initiative to expand and improve its offerings for local students and teachers with a focus on meeting the needs of Title I schools and under-served schools on Chicago's West Side. The new Student Engagement and Educational Development (SEED) program is designed to enhance the quality of fieldtrip experiences for PreK-8 students visiting the conservatory; support teachers in planning and connecting their conservatory fieldtrips to their classroom studies; align fieldtrip content to Next Generation Science Standards; provide increased access to STEM-based fieldtrips for the city's Title I schools; and connect under-resourced schools on Chicago's West Side more deeply to the conservatory. This program will build the organization's capacity to serve more students and teachers each year, and make the conservatory more appealing to teachers, more engaging for students, and easier to access for low-income schools that struggle to provide their students fieldtrip experiences.
Engineering is a critical yet understudied topic in early childhood. Previous research has shown that even young children can engage in (versions of) engineering design practices and processes that are similar to those of adult engineers and designers. In this session, we will share and discuss current research projects to explore how different in-school and out-of-school contexts and activities support 3- to 8-year-old children as they engage in engineering design. We will consider ways that the different characteristics of the activities and spaces, as well as the practices of teachers