SCIENCE

The first years of formal schooling are crucial for children. At the elementary school levels, students must be provided with opportunities to acquire the skills necessary to establish the foundations for a lifetime of learning. The California Next Generation Science Standards (CA NGSS) NGSS and the framework better prepare students for college and careers by instilling in the students crosscutting concepts, which gives them critical thinking skills; open windows of interests, and non-common career opportunities for the students. Each grade level has a target level of understanding that should be reached by all students. Such levels have been thought and planned with the idea that once they make it to college, students would already have the required levels of thinking, analysis, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. To achieve this goal, we have STEAM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics. The goal of STEAM is to foster the true innovation that comes from combining the mind of a scientist with that of an artist.

As teachers, we are obligated to make our students’ goal achievable. So Cal students are mostly part of the non-dominant groups. This means that resources may be limited. The word Science can be intimidating if the concept of such is based on movie characters and unrealistic situations. At Dominguez Hills, we are required to take LBS 405: Engineering and the Arts in the Elementary Schools, where we learned to combined science with artistic skills. The advantage of such collaboration is that gives students tools and methods to explore new and creative ways of problem-solving, displaying data, innovating, and linking multiple fields. As an educator and artist, I can combine these disciplines to develop a colorful, fun, and aesthetically pleasing lesson, no matter the topic. Students engage more effectively when the lesson, materials, hands outs, etc. look appealing and fun. In the same way, Biology 103 gave us the opportunity to have hands-on experiences with laboratory work and demonstrations of representative areas of biology. The level of engagement and learning in this class is because we were doing experiments and writing reports about it.

The arts and STEM subjects naturally complement and inform each other, so implementing STEAM principles into education allows for more understanding, innovation, and a cohesive education in the classroom. My science artifacts are examples of STEAM. The first one is the creation of a rocket. As shown, it is not necessary to have expensive materials to built one, for this assignment, I used two plastic straws. In the artifact, we can see how science instructs and explains how and why the rocket flies. We can also see how artistic skills are being used to plan not only how to build the rocket, but how to improve it by adding it fins. The second one is the laboratory report created for the lesson about Pollination. In the lab we had some samples of different flowers. However, we studied many flowers that were not present during the lesson. To have a visual reference of them, I drew the ones missing.