Kindergarten: Little Explorers

This week in STEM Mrs. Chirco's Kindergarten students explored forces and interactions through venn diagrams and bar graphs. To Start our lesson we talked about how things move and brainstormed all the different ways we could think of. Once we shared all of our background knowledge I introduced students to the term "Venn Diagram". Before we began our venn diagram we worked on a few practice ones to familiarize ourselves with how we could use the diagram to compare and contrast two things outside of STEM class. Students came up with some very creative ideas during our practice!

 Students working together to place pictures on the venn diagram

Once we were comfortable with how to use a venn diagram we began comparing and contrasting pushes and pulls. Each student was given a picture showing pushing, pulling, or both and they had to place them where they thought they went and then share their reasoning. Students blew me away with their out side of the box thinking and logic they placed behind their choices. Once all of the pictures were placed we stood back as a group and decided if any of the pictures needed to be moved and why. Students had a lot of fun reasoning why they would move a particular picture.

When we were done making changes to our venn diagram we then moved on to making a bar graph!


The question we graphed was "What is your favorite way to move?". Each student was given an apple and had to decided which way they liked to move out of the 5 options: Swing, Slide, Ride, Skate, or Jump. After each student had placed their apple above their favorite way to move we then broke down the graph and started comparing and contrasting the various outcomes.

OUR FINDINGS:
* Most students like to jump
* 9 students like to jump
* Only 2 students like to ride
* The same amount of students like to slide and skate
* 4 students like to swing
* More students like to jump than swing
* 5 more students like to jump and swing

To end our lesson students created pictures in Tux Paint and shared their favorite ways to move. 

Ask your kindergarten student what their favorite way to move is!

-Mrs. Henderson