If you attend an Engineering is Elementary professional development workshop at the Museum of Science, Boston, you’ll spend time in our official “EiE Classroom.” The view up the Charles River is spectacular . . . but the classroom itself was a little bland.

No longer. This past winter, EiE commissioned young artist Laura Eckes to create a mural that captures the essence of EiE. The nearly 30-foot-long mural, which shows all 20 EiE storybook characters working collaboratively on engineering design challenges, was unveiled in July.

You'll find helpful tips for teachers every Thursday on the EiE blog.

Each Engineering is Elementary curriculum unit integrates with the science you already teach . . . starting with a storybook. For example, if your elementary students are learning about plants or insects, they'll read a storybook with an agricultural engineering theme, about a young girl who wants the exotic plant in her garden to bloom and makes a device for pollinating it by hand.

There's a good reason to start with stories: they provide an age-appropriate context for the engineering activities that follow. But you don’t have to stop with the “official” EiE storybooks. We have another terrific set of resources to support literacy instruction and reading in your classroom. Check out our Literacy Resources lists—there’s one for each of the 20 EiE units.

“Greatness STEMS from Iowans.” That’s the slogan of the Iowa Governor’s STEM Advisory Council, which works to promote STEM education, innovation, and careers across the state. One of the Council’s ambitious initiatives is the Iowa STEM Scale-Up program, launched in 2012 to promote interest and achievement in STEM for K – 12 students across the state by giving educators greater access to exemplary STEM curricula—and to the professional development needed for successful implementation.

Here at EiE, we were thrilled to learn that for the fourth year in a row, our flagship elementary engineering curriculum has been selected for the STEM Scale-Up. In all, fourteen curricula were selected.

Each Thursday on the EiE Blog, we share helpful tips for teachers.

Do you teach the unit “A Stick in the Mud: Evaluating a Landscape”? Here’s a tip from one of our professional development collaborators, Laura Keeling of Tully Elementary in Louisville, Kentucky. 

As the school’s Learning Lab STEM teacher, Laura sometimes works on the same EiE lesson with several groups of students in a single day. She shares a simple way to cut prep time for one activity in half—AND use fewer resources.

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has announced an ambitious new plan to enhance educational equity with “Cornerstone Assignments,” rigorous, engaging learning experiences for each grade (K – 12) that will be implemented district wide this coming fall. The overall goal is to offer students in the same grade across the district the same learning opportunities. 

We're thrilled to share that under the Cornerstone plan, six EiE units have been selected for implementation (one unit for each elementary grade, K – 5). This means that by the end of the 2016 school year, all 22,000 students at all 75 of the district's elementary schools will have experience with hands-on engineering.