Home Education: 4 Creative Ways to Mix STEM and Play
Getting Unruly with Home Education
In recent weeks, we’ve seen an amazing outpouring of unique educational resources tailored to home education through hands-on science, virtual class field trips, engineering projects, physical play, art, reading, and much more. As teachers and parents navigate new ways to teach, we wanted to provide a few creative ways to mix up STEM and home education through movement!
Wherever kids are learning one thing is sure, they need an opportunity to move their bodies and flex their brains. Taking exercise breaks or incorporating activities in virtual class has been shown to increase physical fitness and improve overall brain health.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s explore some great ways to mix up STEM learning and get moving!
1) Bring Movement to Your Virtual Class!
Fitness guru and physical education teacher, Kevin Tiller, shares his approach to get kids moving in virtual class with 10 new FREE activity cards appropriate for grades K-4. These fun exercises combine math skills, pattern recognition, telling time, and even reading thermometers. Talk about combing a lot of STEM learning into a great workout!
Kids and families looking for more health and fitness tips should explore Fuel Up to Play 60, a free program to get schools and virtual classrooms across the country meeting their wellness goals sponsored by the NFL and the National Dairy Council. This is a great time of year to get your whole family moving together, setting fitness goals, and eating healthy foods!
2) Virtual Class Competitions!
With March Madness on hold, why not create a virtual competition bracket across your virtual class or school? It’s a creative way to encourage competition and get kids working together in virtual class. Teachers are coming up with ingenious ways to get their kids moving by offering virtual group workouts as a class or inviting students to record their top scores or repetitions.
The possibilities for fitness in home education are endless and could even become a weekly challenge to see who tracks the most pushups or who can do 20 pushups a day for 20 days. Take a look at a variety of quick videos from Mr.LosePE on twitter to show proper form for a range of exercises that you might consider incorporating into your own fitness and movement challenge.
3) Splat Jacks with Splats!
Coding meets physical fitness in this dynamic lesson plan where students write the code to count jumping jacks on Unruly Splats with conditional statements. Unruly Splats are programmable floor buttons that kids code to light up, make sounds, and keep track of points. In this lesson, using the and connector with if/then blocks; the program senses when both splats are jumped on at the same time. For every successful “Splat Jack”, you will collect a point and the Splats will light up a random color and make a “quack” sound. This is a great activity to do at home as it does not require a lot of space.
Explore coding and STEM while creating a physically active and fun game in the process!
If you don't have physical splats, try our Splats Memory Challenge lesson which can all be done through virtual Splats with our web app.
4) Create Your Own Active Game!
In true Unruly style, we invite you to jump feet first into block coding with students. Challenge them to create their own engaging games and activities from your class or virtual class! In these lessons, we start with the basics of coding Splats to make them light up and make sounds when stomped on.
With the Splats App, students use their creativity to make virtual games with lights, sounds, and colors with virtual Splats or Splats at home. Teachers can offer up open-ended challenge prompts like, “how should we work a timer into this game” to give students the opportunity to use their creativity to modify games and make their own rules.
These lessons continue to build on key concepts with increasing difficulty and new prompts that include functions, conditional statements, and other variables.
We hope you enjoy these quick tips and sample lessons for home education as much as we enjoyed pulling them together. Reach out and share your experience with us on Twitter or contact our team to learn more at educators@unruly-studios.com!
