Teachers use stem challenges as team building activities for kids, but if you are a cart stem teacher that moves from class to class or sees many classes in one week, then you might be wondering how to build community with those classes when you only see them for 30 minutes to an hour a week. In this post, I will be discussing 3 building community activities for Stem class in elementary.
Why Is Building Community Important?
Before you get started, you need to think about what you want your classroom culture to be?
- What do you want it to feel like?
- How do you want students to talk about your class to others?
- Do you want it to be loving and caring and nurturing?
- Do you want it to have a learning focus?
- Do you want the focus to be learning for justice?
Never Have I Ever Zoom Game
- Never have I ever…made a video to show my design
- Never have I ever…gone to a field trip to the zoo or museum
- Never have I ever…entered into a robotics competition
- Never have I ever…didn’t want to participate
It Starts With the Teacher
One of the most important building community activities involved the teacher. Students need to feel loved, cared for, protected, and safe to thrive in such a difficult space that is constantly assessing their knowledge.
Take time to open up to your students and letting them know who you are and why you’re a teacher. In my presentations, I explain where I was born, who’s in my family, where I grew up, what college I went to, what my dreams are, etc.
Goals
For the next building community activity, you can allow the students to get to know one another. If you are distant, this can be a shared document. if you are brick and mortar, then you can have students share their goals or post their assignments on a bulletin board. This resource is a flipbook that students can write goals, and it can also be hung on a bulletin board for all to see.
The goals can be for the year and include academic, personal, or health goals. You can also have goals that are just for stem classes. If the students have had stem before, they already know that there will be many design challenges, working in groups, presentations, etc. You can review each of those components and have the students choose one goal for your class. This can be kept for the entire year, and the students can revisit this goal every month or so.
Student Surveys
Get to know your students! What do they like to do? Who they live with? What is their least favorite thing in the world? What kind of dreams or goals do they have for themselves? Provide opportunities to survey the students, and Google Forms makes it very easy to do this.
Click here to sign up to receive this free “Get to Know You” activity for kids. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the class, but the students’ lives are bigger than the class. In this activity, students will be able to insert a funny picture or meme, a picture of themselves, and a picture of a dream career. They can then list out three goals they have for the year or for their life.
Students have had a blast filling this out. Once they submitted the assignments through Google Classroom, I was able to compile all of the slides into one slide deck. I shared that slide deck with the entire class, and they were able to get to know their peers that way. I did let the students know those were my intentions before they even started the activity.
This Freebie is on me!
Looking to embed ELA with science (or vice versa)? Get these writing prompts that will get your students thinking about what they’re learning in science class as they practice their writing skills!