At EiE, we’re constantly improving our curriculum as we discover more about how children learn. Our preschool pilot tests have been full of surprises and insights. Our testing has shown us how much preschoolers love to learn, but it’s also taught us that sometimes children’s knowledge of the properties of materials doesn’t override their drive to use the coolest-looking material—at least not at first! Katy Laguzza, the senior curriculum developer and lead of our Early Childhood project, shared a hilarious scene she observed in a preschool classroom that helped our team to understand the unique perspectives of preschoolers. The class was engineering a raft (a CD) to float a toy above water. To make the raft float, they would choose materials to attach to the bottom of the CD using Velcro.

There’s nothing quite like a room full of kids testing aeronautical technologies—it’s exciting, uplifting, and so much fun! When kids watch a technology they engineered fly through the air, it makes the act of testing designs into a spectacle and helps them visualize the amazing things they can accomplish when they use the Engineering Design Process. Between our in-school curriculum and our out-of-school-time curriculum, there are plenty of EiE units that will help the young engineers in your program soar to new heights.

A total of 42 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics and English Language Arts. An engaging and effective way to meet these standards is through classroom engineering—and Engineering is Elementary offers convenient CCSS Alignment Guides to help you make the connections.

Have you remembered to “spring forward" yet? If you were up very early on Sunday morning, you might’ve noticed the clock on your phone suddenly jumped an hour into the future—don’t forget to reset your watch, too! This leap marked the beginning of Daylight Saving Time, the period from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November when clocks are set one hour ahead of Standard Time. While the extra hour of sleep gained during the return in the fall to Standard Time is quite popular amongst night owls and college students, this biannual time adjustment is also responsible for plenty of headaches. One of the complications it creates is also an interesting engineering problem—how do you make sure everyone is “on time”?

We’ve been very excited to roll out our new online professional development offerings over the past few months—we’ve conducted webinars about habits of mind and engineering in out-of-school time and we’ve had some amazing discussions with educators around the country about STEM integration and ELA connections. Now, we’re ready to take online PD to the next level with the very first online workshop series this summer. We’re looking for a small group of highly motivated teachers to help us pilot test this new experience. If you are selected, you’ll receive a scholarship that includes:

• three online professional development sessions
• an EiE teacher guide of your choice
• the EiE materials kit for the unit
• a classroom set of 24 storybooks for the unit
• a $150 stipend for your feedback about the experience