ROME, GA— The STEAM room at Elm Street Elementary is a space where big ideas can be explored. It’s an encouraging place for developing minds to try, to test and to figure things out. Some ideas work and some don’t right away, and some ideas get scratched altogether and back to the drawing board it is.
A unique style of learning is found in that journey between a thought and a finished prototype one can see, touch and employ in the real world. This is the sweet spot upon which STEAM teacher Chelsea Losh capitalizes with the young Wolves that move through her classroom.
Fridays in STEAM class are busy and fun. They are days for sharing and community involvement. Due to the short week of learning as a result of the observance of Labor Day, the STEAM Share Day on Sept. 9, 2022, was more of a work day, but the wonder of possibility and a sense of community were ever present.
Linda Patty, Fire Safety Educator with the Rome-Floyd Fire Department, and Eric Vaughn, Senior Security Engineer with AT&T, Cubmaster of Pack 113, and RHS Band Booster president served as community volunteers and spent time working hands-on with Losh’s first and fourth grade classes as they worked in small groups of fours and fives to tackle problems identified in their respective book-related capstone projects. Rome High School engineering student Sam Winstead was also present as a STEM Ambassador to provide additional hands and input to students working to complete their prototypes.
Losh explained that Elm Street teachers meet for grade level meetings monthly to discuss the curriculum standards for that period and ensure continuity is woven through all disciplines. Losh develops each grade level’s capstone project in STEAM to apply the standards on which they are working in their academic classes. She hopes the projects will challenge students to think more critically about how to apply what they are learning in school to the real world. “It’s a lot of puzzle pieces to pull together,” she said, “but it helps the kids connect the dots of what they are learning.”
For example, after reading “Mercy Watson to the Rescue” in ELA in which the bed breaks under the weight of Mercy the pig, second grade students were tasked with designing a bed with popsicle sticks and tape that would hold four pounds. Once tested and passed, students will use fabric and paint to complete their prototypes.
Fourth graders have been learning about weather instruments in science, data collection in math and recently finished reading “Tornado” in ELA. To combine and relate these standards, Losh worked with those students to research climate and the increasingly extreme weather events across our planet and challenged them to plan and create a new instrument to better predict weather. Losh said they will be testing all mechanical parts of the prototypes once complete to see if they work.
Losh is forward-thinking and hopes that eventually projects like this one will be the foundational building blocks of fully working prototypes for more advanced STEM students. In other words, the eventual goal is for high school engineering students to build off the ideas and designs of STEM students like those at Elm Street and other elementary schools.
Seeing her students’ ideas and models develop into working instruments would be a dream come true and bring their efforts full circle. In the meantime, Elm Street STEAM students will keep their gears oiled and spinning.
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