Fourth-grade students at Circleville Elementary School took part in the 10th annual “Trick or Treat for STEM” on Halloween, with activities that involved science, technology, engineering and math.
Students in Andrea Urmston, Kaylin Bourke, and Lisa Quick and Jaclyn Krauss’s classes rotated through the three classrooms and completed a different activity in each:
- Bone Bridges where they designed and built a bridge to hold candy pumpkins using Q-tips, clothespins, popsicle sticks, rubber bands and pipe cleaners.
- M&M Statistics where they had to find the average number of M&Ms in a bag as well as the average of each color using an Excel spreadsheet.
- Winging It where they created wings from paper and attached to a paper bat to see which design got the most air.
In addition, each class placed a couple candy pumpkins in four different solutions – water, seltzer, oil and vinegar – to see which solution caused the most change to the candy.
This is a wonderful opportunity for the students to collaborate with classmates and get hands-on experience with all of the topics of STEM. To add to the fun of the day, it was Halloween so we had baseball players, pumpkins, skeletons, princesses, chemists and even a hot dog working the projects.
In 2014, this event started as “Trick or Treat for Science,” then became “Trick or Treat for STEM.”
The idea originally stemmed from longtime friends Andrea Urmston, now a fourth-grade teacher at CES, and Melissa Rancourt, founder of Greenlight for Girls (G4G). They were brainstorming ways to incorporate the mission of G4G into the classroom as well as ways to incorporate classroom realities into the organization.
Go to the district’s Facebook page for more photos from the day!
For more information on the global organization Greenlight for Girls, visit their website or Facebook page.