Junior Kindergarten
Unit 3: STEM Activities (8 weeks) 

Unit Summary

Students will have fun building, measuring, learning about cause and effect, and more with eight hands-on STEM activities. Students will practice their skills in: problem solving, following directions, sequential thought, critical thinking, measurement, parts-to-whole relationship, counting, sorting, matching, patterning, cause and effect, spatial relationships, creativity, fine motor skills, and eye-hand coordination.

Enduring Understandings

Essential Questions
Students will understand that:
  • Engineers use scientific knowledge, mathematics, and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical and practical problems. 
  • Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost.
  • What is engineering?
  • Why is STEM education important today?
  • Who should be an engineer?

Knowledge 

Skills 
The student will know...
  • Evidence is generated and evaluated as part of building and refining models and explanations.​
  • Mathematics and technology are used to gather, analyze, and communicate results.
  • Scientific reasoning is used to support scientific conclusions.
  • Scientific models and understandings of fundamental concepts and principles are refined as new evidence is considered.
  • Predictions and explanations are revised to account more completely for available evidence.
  • Science is a practice in which an established body of knowledge is continually revised, refined, and extended.
The student will be able to...
  • Design investigations and use scientific instrumentation to collect, analyze, and evaluate evidence as part of building and revising models and explanations.
  • Gather, evaluate, and represent evidence using scientific tools, technologies, and computational strategies. ​
  • Use quality controls to examine data sets and to examine evidence as a means of generating and reviewing explanations.
  • Monitor one’s own thinking as understandings of scientific concepts are refined.
  • Revise predictions or explanations on the basis of discovering new evidence, learning new information, or using models.
  • Generate new and productive questions to evaluate and refine core explanations.