Harnessing STEAM Power

With the new school year comes new STEAM activities! After receiving a State of Iowa Scale-Up STEM grant last spring, we are now able to expand the STEAM offerings to students. Still popular among students were things like Spheros and 3D pens and Cubelets, but students were also able to explore using 3Dux Design activities, dry felting, and Strawbees.


With task and challenge cards available to students both in the activities themselves and in Google Classroom, students explored making, creating, designing, and imagining all sorts of things!

With additional new items still waiting in the wings, students will have additional STEAM days to explore again!

Digital Breakout, Round 2

After a successful digital breakout last fall (you can read about it HERE), it was time to design another breakout for Literacy Studies students. And thanks to Matt Miller from Ditch That Textbook and guest contributor Mandi Tolen, tips and hints were available to help shape a new breakout for students. (You can read the blog post HERE.)

Photo by John Sting on Unsplash

With students more than one quarter into the school year, some find themselves in a bit of a reading slump. One of the goals of the breakout was to share book ideas with students, along with more traditional breakout goals like problem solving, team work, critical thinking, and communication.

The title of the breakout was "Let's Talk About Reading," and students merely scrolled the Home page of the Google Site to find two photographs of our own library. 

Clicking on the "obvious" elements in the photos, students accessed a variety of clues to help them determine the combinations to four different locks. (One of the elements was a dummy clue that took students to a humorous video related to books.) A Google Form embedded in the Site on a second page allowed students to enter a response, and they immediately received feedback from the Form to know if their response was correct.

So what kind of clues did the students access? One was a Google Slides presentation that included six of the most popular series in the library; another was a Google Doc that included the YALSA Top 10 titles from 2019. Students read a blog post related to five historical fiction titles, as well as a poem related to books. Working in small groups, students worked to determine as many lock combinations as they were able.

Later in the year, Literacy Studies students will work through a combination breakout--one that incorporates the physical locks and box that they used for an earlier breakout *and* the digital components they used for this breakout. Stay tuned for more problem solving, collaboration, and critical thinking!

3-2-1 Responses

In a professional development session last spring, a colleague shared an activity she called "3-2-1 Responses" as a way to get students talking with one another about both new and learned content. Literacy Studies students have been using this activity verbally, but this time we tried it as a written response.

Throughout the year, students access our All Things Reading Symbaloo for a variety of reasons, including author study work and finding author and title read-alikes.

You can access the Symbaloo HERE.

As a way to gather student responses and guide their exploration at different author and book series websites, students completed a 3-2-1 chart on a handout shared with them in our Google Classroom.

How great to read such a variety of responses from so many of the students! While many visited the same sites--April Henry, Raina Telgemeier, and Alan Gratz were their top 3 choices--the 3-2-1 format gave such a range of answers and helped guide their reading and work at each site. 

Stay tuned--more 3-2-1 activities to follow--it's a great way to get students sharing and talking about their work!