Pushing buttons is not a essential skill! It is not a skill that is required for basic survival. What does basic survival require? What must you do to keep basic life functions going? Food, water, clothing, housing, financial support, breath,... luckily that last skill is autonomic and begins the moment you are born. The rest you have to learn how to provide for yourself and potentially your family some day. Pushing buttons on a computer or other device is not an essential skill listed above but it has become the key to success in all aspects of life. As I write this I am happy that my laptop is not crashing like usual. But where do you start? If we are focused on teaching children real life essential skills, then possibly we must start with the basics early on because as soon as children start school they are inundated with technological devices. Don’t worry parents, your children will learn to operate all the required technology in school. What they won’t learn is how to cook or load the dishwasher or wash their clothes or provide for a household, or be financially responsible. They learn those things, those essential skills from the model they are given at home… from you, their parents.

Teaching really small children real life essential skills is not easy. In fact it takes an extraordinary level of patience and allowance for creating a safe space where kids can fail multiple times as they learn perseverance on the road to final success in whatever they are trying to learn. Invite your children to work along side you in the kitchen, yard, cleaning bathrooms or the multitude of household chores that every human must learn and do in order to maintain basic homeostasis. Invite them to help you balance the family budget. Better yet, teach them by having them work for their own money. Help them to set up a budget in order to pay for certain extra special privileges. I promise your children will flourish with this basic training as they make the jump into adulthood.

When I taught 4th and 5th grade, I set up a classroom economy with jobs, elections, market days, land ownership, and earned salaries. We budgeted. We bought! We saved! We spent! Sometimes too much and sometimes not enough to get that coveted item from market day. The classroom was a tiny cosmos economy complete with monopolists and monopsonists. It was one of the most coveted classroom experiences even if it sometimes produced a few tears when deals were lost. Could you do this at home with younger children. Absolutely! I had many kids come back to me years later and say they learned a great deal from this experience. So, parents, I commission you to begin teaching the essential skills to run a household before kindergarten. This does not mean they will be masters at it, but at least they will have an idea of the essential skills needed to sustain their lives as they grow older. This knowledge might even give them some intrinsic motivation to work harder for whatever they desire in life.

Where? Oh, Where, did the Truth GO?

In this day in age where people are seeped in click-bait headlines, fear based propaganda and journalism that is skewed politically, biased and reported with exaggeration or populated with opinionized “facts” which often turn out to not be based in any real data or solid peer-reviewed science, what should we do as educators and parents for the next generations? How do we help our children wade through web muck and actually discover the truth about any given topic?

Ground them in truth and reality from the beginning. Start when they are small and teach them about the principles of hard work. Let them fall down and help them to get back up,... brush it off and try, try again. Teach them what it takes to run a household and require that they have meaningful jobs where they can see their contribution to the family. Even if they do a poor job of whatever chore you give them, help them to see that they are contributing and encourage a better job next time. Whether you pay them an allowance or not, teach them the value of money and how to be responsible with this resource when they are young. Don’t always say “yes” to everything they want right away. Teach them the gift of working towards a goal.

In this current society of instant gratification, teaching them to wait and work towards something will be one of the most gratifying lessons learned, especially as they bound into early adulthood with a little bit of perspective on the reality of being a productive member of society.

These are basic truths for raising and training strong, able-minded children who will be set up for success in this fast paced world of lies and misinformation. These balanced children will grow into young adulthood with a grounded perspective which will set them up to not fall victim to media sensationalism. They will be able to weigh the information out and apply logical reasoning to every fear-laced suggestive headline. They will be willing to do a little digging and ferret out the truth in every situation because they are not afraid to put a little effort into life and making a sound decision.

Train up a child in the way they should go and when they are old, they will not depart from it.

-Proverbs 22:6

As teachers, especially as science teachers, we are told that we must prepare students for career paths that don’t even exist yet! What! How are we supposed to do that, you might gasp? A daunting task, right? Absolutely! In 10 years of teaching, I have already witnessed a generation who are unable to cut a straight line with their scissors by middle school, let alone follow a general and simple process that will lead to a finished product of quality. Write their thoughts coherently with proper grammar or read for learning. Not! But give them a device and they will run circles around you on any given app.

As an adult, raised on dirt and adventure before the internet, this generation will make your head spin and you will often be made to feel like a technology fetus. Curiosity drives humans to learn and innovate. Of course, by middle school, this generation often uses this drive coupled with their savvy tech skills to explore great and often dark spaces of the virtual world. Their knowledge about the virtual world is endless. They know, but don’t always comprehend, what they are taking into their immature minds let alone how to choose wisely what rabbit trail they should pursue. However, the reality is,... THIS is where they wish to live.

Hours and hours spent fully immersed in life-like games of imagination and violence. Want to know the latest social media fad, just ask a tween. They know it, have used it and probably modified it to fit their need for posting and trolling for followers. Learning to read, most of them can but, “Read for Learning” is a motto of our past educational parameters. Students will search for their favorite video to learn just about anything these days. Is reading and writing obsolete? I sure hope not, but for the younger generations, it is not their preferred method of learning. They just want a mind-dump from their favorite You-tuber.

As a teacher, I have seen this need to focus students through video clips and science movies. I’ve implemented them into the classroom in every unit I teach in order to achieve a depth of learning and attention on any given subject. But this is not my main focus. My main focus with any given unit is to have the students “DO” as much as possible, thereby building skills for real life. I walk them through STEAM Genius and the engineering design process which demands that students think, create, try, fail, TRY AGAIN, construct, model, modify, test, and market their idea to their peers with an aesthetic, comprehensive and well-constructed product. They use multiple cross-curricular and human systems together throughout this process. By the end of their time spent with STEAM Genius, they, not only love science and learning new things, they also happen to have improved their scissor skills, let alone a whole host of mental and physical capacities which fully prepare them for that job, in their future, that hasn’t even been created yet.

Let us join together in this mindset of teaching kids real life things, so that they may tackle their unknown futures with well-rounded capabilities. Let us STEAM Genius!

#makingsciencereal #stemteacher #steamgenius

During the early stages of ideation for STEAM Genius back in 2014-15, I happened upon a movement which was fairly new at the time but spoke perfectly into my hands-on approach for teaching and student learning... The Maker Movement! The celebration of the Maker Movement seemed to be these events called Maker Faires! And, they seemed to be popping up all over the U.S. "Well," I thought to myself, "What if I bring this idea into the classroom? What if I collect all that we do in class and have a mini-Maker Faire at the end of each school year to celebrate what we have explored, created, developed, pursued, constructed, and learned... what we have actually MADE?”

The Maker Movement has exploded globally, and I'm in my fourth year of celebrating all that we do in science with my annual STEAM Genius Mini-Maker Faire. It's the high point of the school year, with not only projects and work that the entire middle school has worked on in-class throughout the year, but also involves projects using the Engineering Design Process coupled with each student's individual interests or passions, being showcased. This means we celebrate everything from homemade video games to fashion design to edible water bottles to 3-D print creations to gasifiers to giant sling-shots . The diversity of celebrated projects is quite endless. For many of the students, it is really amazing to get to exhibit their own interests and abilities to others for the first time. We always have a packed out faire space which takes over the indoor gymnasium and outdoor covered play area at the middle school where I teach science to approximately 125 students, 6th-8th grades. I wish I could inspire all schools to celebrate STEAMgenius with their own Mini-Maker Faires!

Check out, under my videos tab, the professional video made of one of my faires a couple of years ago at the school I worked at, Horizon Christian, Tualatin, Oregon. I hope it inspires you!

Written by Shana L. Hildreth, B.S., M.A.T.

Idea Developed and Implemented in the Classroom by Shana L. Hildreth, 2016

Everybody loves candy... especially middle school kids. It's always fun to get questions from the younger grades that see me setting up for this candy making lab. They enthusiastically ask... do WE get to make candy? 8th grade is the year! While some are sorely disappointed by having to wait... most are filled with longing and hope for the future. This lab is truly one of the highlights of chemistry in 8th grade and everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is easily engaged with how chemicals bond with this lab.

The best way to challenge thinking is to have students deal in components that they are already vested in, for example, this lab starts with a real life scenario which challenges the students to make the best tasting and aesthetic hard candy with the lowest price point for a fictional business fundraiser. The challenge/scenario, procedures, ingredients, and base price points are clearly outlined. The lab also includes some great conclusion style analysis questions at the end to hit home the actual learning of chemical bonding.

Probably the best learning experience from this lab is the hands-on, real life cooking skills of making candy. So many students these days do not have any practical sense of how hard it is to take ingredients and make something taste good from scratch. Exact measurements are critical... WHAT! Focus and precision are key to success... WHO KNEW! What do you mean, you can't just throw some ingredients in a bowl and heat it up? Sugar burns easily? REALLY easily! What happens if the batch tastes absolutely terrible? How do you make it better? Your group needs to think and try again! Too much citric acid mixed with the wrong flavoring ruins batches! If you use too much food coloring the candy taste like a giant chemical bomb went off in your mouth. The tools are tricky to use and can break if dropped. The glass stirring rod does not double well as a drumstick! Hot plates are HOT and boiling butter and water DO NOT mix. There are so many huge, authentic learning avenues with this STEAM lab activity.

The joys of teaching students real things are often messy and chaotic, but completely worth the risks. Be brave and let your students explore, get dirty, laugh, fail, break things even,... you are their guide, sometimes their only positive example. Prove to them that it is okay to do the "hard things" in life fearlessly.

Credit: Candy Engineering Lab (O.S.T.A. Workshop Lesson Plan)

#Chemistry #Makingsciencereal #STEAMteacher #STEAMeducation #Science

Written by Shana L. Hildreth, B.S., M.A.T.

November 2019

Teach your kids to fearlessly live.

Not every stranger is a rapist, murderer, or kidnapper! By the time students enter my middle school classes, they have been taught to deeply mistrust anyone they don't know. How do you establish new relationships with such mistrust?

Did you know that you, as a parent, teach fear?

I see it every day in and outside the classroom, especially outside.... We are taught from the very beginning to NOT do things: don't touch, don't put that in your mouth, don't jump off of that. Everything is too hot, too icky, or too high. Danger, danger Will Robinson! What it truly is IS simply a safety issue in the early stages of life. It is important to teach your child to be safe especially at a young age, but as they grow often the list of DON'Ts grows intead of decreases.

Instead of teaching fear, we should teach the mentality of what could go right instead of what could go wrong.

Be positive!

Leave your worst case seneraios inside your brain. Look for what your child can do and then let them stretch and experience more than you are comfortable letting them. This is especially true after they learn basic safety rules. Let them think you are not watching their every move. You might be surprised by what your child can do.

I learned this early on with my oldest son. He gave me heart attacks on a daily basis. He was ten and a half months old and we were painting our house. The 22 foot ladder was propted up against the house. My son had never climbed a ladder before. He had only just started walking two weeks prior. I literally turned away for thirty seconds and when I turned back in his general direction, my baby was ten feet up that ladder. He officially became a toddler that day. From then on I knew I had to be on high alert, but also that my child could and would do a lot more than I ever expected, if he was let to roam just a bit. The best news is he continues to surprise me to this day 20 years later. He tackles adult- hood with a bold, conquering spirit because he was raised with a healthy respect for life,... never fear.

Teach what could go RIGHT and then sit back and watch your child be magical.