Changing the world through STEAM education
Welcome To The STEAM Café
The STEAM Café is dedicated to providing quality STEAM content to teachers and families. Please scroll down to view our blogs, or click the button to head over to our library.
Recent Blog Posts

Dealing With The Epic Fail
In our Saturday webinar with Kerry Tracy from Feel Good Teaching, she touched upon the topic of failures. While teachers may have the impulse to save kids from feeling failure and disappointment, failure —especially epic failure, where everything falls apart— is a valuable teachable moment for our students. When students fail and are given strategies and opportunities to recover

Engineering Lesson Structure
Last week I wrote about introducing engineering practices to your classroom. This week, let’s take it a step further and go through the structure of a STEM Challenge. What are the components and how much time should you plan for each? Here’s a quick video describing each step. The STEM Challenge Cycle The STEM Challenge Cycle & the Engineering

Introducing Engineering Practices to Your Classroom
Although STEM Challenges aren’t magic, they’re the closest thing to it that I’ve ever experienced in my teaching career! There are so many benefits – developing critical thinking, problem-solving, growth mindset and more. But like so many things in teaching, the magic is in how you deliver the activity to your students. One approach will get all the academic

Myth Busting Labs that Demonstrate the Nature of Science
This powerpoint is from one of Yen’s workshops at ISTS this year. You can use it to create your own myth-busting labs in your classroom that reflects the same processes that scientists use in the real world! Elementary science labs can be fun and interesting, while also being realistic and inquiry-based. If you want the metamaps you can grab them

The Simple Guide to an Incredibly Useful Theory Called Interactive Spatial Learning
I’m going to share a bit of background with you before I outline Interactive Spatial Learning (ISL) and how it can help structure your classroom

How to Incorporate STEM Thinking into Your Craft and Art Lessons
Classroom learning is subject-specific, even though organic learning in the real world is cross-curricular, experiential, and contextual. A thematic approach toward teaching subjects in

Craft Or STEM – A Handy Flow Chart to Help You Figure Out What Your Activity Is
Not all art is STEM and not all STEM is art. We’ve made a handy tool to help you determine some of the differences! Here’s

Tips for Adding Rigor to Your Elementary Classroom STEM Lessons
A common issue we find in classrooms is the use of STEM-related activities (such as worksheets, learning to code, makerspace builds, video creation, writing blogs,

A Strategy for Planning Down Time and Accomplishing Your Summer Goals
Before you leave your classroom this summer, use our quick, handy dandy flow chart to get you to the heart of your summer goals with

3 Elementary School Experiments with Shaving Cream for the End of the Year
In most areas of the United States, the warmer weather has both teachers and kids thinking about summer. For me, I started thinking about science
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