BY PATRICIA NEWMAN
Are you ready for a New Year’s Resolution you can keep? In this age of too-much-to-do and too-little-time-to-do-it, doesn’t it make sense to integrate subject minutes wherever possible? That’s exactly what we’re all about here at LitLinks — providing hands-on lessons inspired by children’s literature that integrate STEM with the language arts. Today’s recap focuses on design challenges to help your students practice creative problem-solving!
The standards
According to the Next Generation Science Standards, “Early in their science education, students need opportunities to engage in constructing and critiquing explanations. They should be encouraged to develop explanations of what they observe when conducting their own investigations and to evaluate their own and others’ explanations for consistency with the evidence.”*
Additionally, the reading of complex informational texts is a foundation of the Common Core Standards. “By asking students to answer questions and think critically about what they’ve read, the standards help build essential skills in problem-solving, analysis, and critical thinking—skills needed for success beyond school.”**
Design challenges are the BEST of language arts and science!
Design challenges
To contrust an explanation for a problem, students require an a fluency with the text, an understanding of the problem, and the ability to think of creative solutions, tweaked and solidified based on the results of testing.
Enjoy these three lessons featuring books about Mars, Wonder Woman, and medical inventions such as prosthetic limbs.
Easiest resolution you ever made, right?
*National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2012. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13165.
**https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/
Featured image credit: “Where design thinking and open source community collaboration meet” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Leave a Reply
Your email is safe with me.