Are you an afterschool educator? Thinking about the coming school year and planning afterschool activities for elementary students? We’ve got a suggestion: take your kids on an engineering adventure!

Engineering Adventures are hands-on engineering units designed expressly for kids in grades 3 – 5 in out-of-school time settings. India and Jacob, a globetrotting brother-and-sister team, guide your kids through the engineering design process to solve real world problems. Each unit consists of 6 - 8 adventures. 

It’s easier than ever to add Engineering Adventures to your mix of programming. Convenient and cost-effective materials kits are now available for all seven Engineering Adventures units. Each kit includes enough supplies for up 24 kids.

Each Thursday on the EiE blog, we offer tips for teachers and answer your questions. 

Q. Our district will allow us to purchase EiE Teacher Guides, but not the Materials Kits. I really want to teach EiE! Can I still use your curriculum?

A. Yes! When we designed each curriculum unit, we deliberately created activities that call for easy-to-find, inexpensive materials so you can put together your own kit.

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.