Over the past couple of months I have been interacting with many teachers who are asking about makerspaces. Educators, administrators, students, and parents are hearing the terms ‘makerspace’ and ‘makers’ more and more and wondering exactly what that means as well as how it impacts the learning envi...

Since I am so inspired by space and love learning and following our progress exploring the last frontier, I wanted to write a quick post to acknowledge an incredible milestone in space travel. On Thursday (March 30, 2107) SpaceX successfully launched a satellite into orbit with a reused rocket. This...

In third grade, the students learn the difference between physical features and human-made features. Learning begins with just looking at a set of pictures and discussing what they notice and what the images might have in common. Then they look at another set of pictures and have the same conversati...

Please note, this is a follow on from the previous post Disappearing Water. The second day of this experiment is great! The students are so excited and are begging to get answers. I tell the students that they will get answers, but first they must step into the role of a scientist. All great scienti...

When my students leave school on the Friday afternoon of the very first week, I want each child to want to return to school on Monday. I want my students to feel energized and excited about the upcoming year of learning that will happen in our classroom. My goal is for my students to feel safe and c...

I just wanted to take a moment to write a post about some of the electronics resources we will use throughout our science experiments and projects for the classroom. Everything we use is available to the general public and more often than not, we will include links to purchase the exact same materia...

Just to follow up the post The New Space Race, I wanted to write a post about my favorite space related web resource. As I mentioned before in Our First Post, perhaps my greatest passion and interest is space. Ever since I was a child I dreamed of working at NASA and participating in the space progr...

As I have mentioned in previous posts, NASA and space related education truly inspired me to become an engineer. I wanted to be part of something exciting, something cutting edge. Space truly is the final frontier and almost everything we have done or will do in space is an amazing challenge. With t...

This post goes along with the previous post Learning About Forces and Motion with Ramps. Rosanna and I thought it would be neat to integrate technology into the lesson about motion just to get the kids thinking about it. I came up with the idea to create a sort of 'radar gun' that the students could...

I always look forward to the beginning of the school year and laying the foundation for science for the rest of the year. One of the first science topics in the 3rd grade curriculum is for students to learn about forces and motion. We study the basics about pushing and pulling forces and how those f...