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Good Practices:

using STEMIE tales for the children to come up with the problems and how to solve them.

Using the sentence structure 'I wonder ...' to encourage the children to think and reflect.

Having 2 sessions (days) for 1 lesson for the children to have more time to process the concepts

SCAMPER displays, pictures of inventions and inventors for the children and teachers to refer to.

Challenges:

eliciting responses from the children

teachers need more training and practice on questioning skills.

Not enough resources

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Good practices

My K2s are excited to start STEMIE lessons with a SCAMPER song. They memorized these big words.

This helped them to get familiarized with what STEMIE lessons are like.

"What's the problem, how can we solve it, any ideas to solve it?" Were the usual words in their mouth seen and observed by teachers in their daily lives

Children questions and during exploration, children were observed expressing their ideas freely and engaged in giving ideas for the solution.

Children identify a problem through pictorial support resources.

SCAMPER helped the K2 children to come up with solutions but need more in depth understanding of each acronym.

Challenges:

Teachers need a lot of facilitation and derive children's answer.

SCAMPER method is hard for children to understand

Each acronym is very complex and couldn't be understood for N2-K1)

If the teacher doesn't go to the training, they don't know what to put on the STEMIE wall and how to set up their learning centre

It's challenging to prompt children's ideas because they have limited knowledge. They can only think about what is around them and in the classroom.

As for teachers, the solution we give is already in the market. Teachers need to be creative and inventive thinker. Do advanced research.

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Good Practices:

Using questioning techniques to prompt children’s thinking about the problem given.

Materials such as GOBOX for children to create their inventions.

Children discuss the problems stated and come up with ideas to solve a problem.

Challenges:

Limited time and space to display inventions

Topic/problems given might be too difficult for them to understand fully

Lack of resources

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Good Practices:

My K2 loved singing every words in the SCAMPER song. From the song, they learnt what each letter stands for.

We can hear our children saying, "What's the problem? What is the best solution? How can we solve it? Let's share our ideas?" in their learning centre communicating with their friends.

They also became aware of the inventions around them, learn its purpose, benefit for people around them.

Foster teamwork and collaboration through group work projects where children can work together to solve problems or build something.

Integrated learning as STEMIE blend with art and literature, such as drawing and describing their inventions and express their ideas whether in writing or speaking.

Children were also encouraged observation and inquiry using questioning techniques

Challenges

Keeping activities fresh and engaging as SCAMPER acronym - each word must slowly be taught to the children for them to be understand well.

setting up the corners

In depth teacher's understanding of each unit

Identifying

Understanding

Ideating

Designing

Building

Testing

Communicating

Entrepreneurship

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Good Practices:

Children get to explore with a variety of materials such as recyclables, manipulatives, go box and loose items to create their prototypes.

Children get to explore real world problems

Children get the opportunity to explore tech toys such as Bee bots

Children get to put their creative and logical thinking to work. (open ended qns )

Children build confidence through pitching/ sharing ideas between peers thru discussions.

Now that we have Makerspace our children get to explore building/assembling things from problems

Challenges:

Time constraint - facilitating small groups to accommodate children's burst of ideas and draw and write down their ideas

Ability to generate deeper ideas to solve problems (children suggest ideas that are already available)

Lack of resources to build the different centres stated in lesson plan

Getting children to ask questions without teachers prompting

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Good Practices

Providing a variety of materials for children to explore with (recycled materials, go box etc.)

Encouraging children to reflect, brainstorm and invent

Challenges

Children requires teacher prompts

The problems the children identify may not tie in with lesson plans (For example; children identify that without the bottle strap, they cannot sling or carry the water bottle. However the next STEMIE lesson is to design a bottle cap).

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Good Practices:

We encourage children to think and solve the problem using questioning techniques.

Accepting all children's ideas and letting them try all the possible solutions and choose the better one.

Using SCAMPER to brainstorm solutions to a problem.

Challenges:

Not enough resources/materials to use.

teachers have limited ideas on how to set up various corners stated in the lesson plan (e.g. thinking corner, research corner, etc).

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Good Practices:

• Expands children vocabulary

• Thinking out of the box

• Encourages children’s participation and involvement in discussions

Challenges faced:

• Isn’t appropriate for their age group as it requires a higher level of thinking and speaking skills

• Children aren’t able to come up with innovate ideas themselves, they require teacher’s guidance to a great extend

• They aren’t able to draw out / create a craft on their own to illustrate their innovations as some of them just end up scribbling

• Children also get bored of the concepts fast as it does not contain visually interesting elements in it

• They also tend to lack understanding in some of the key concepts and struggle with coming up with solutions to tackle the problems that were being brought up

• Children have difficulty writing of the log

• Lessons and ideas are teacher guided

• Children need teacher to do the prompting of ideas and do not want to think of new ideas on their own

• Children who can write fast and well always do the recording or writing

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Good practices:

Using the GOBOX for children to create their inventions

The song helps children to SCAMPER their invention

Children discuss the problem as a class and focus on solving the problem

Pictorial materials are given for children to better visualise some inventions they can create (e.g., Little Red Riding Hood)

Challenges:

Limited time for children to complete their STEMIE lesson

Unable to conveniently keep and display the GOBOX materials

Unable to store/display their physical inventions

Unable to find some of the resources stated in the lesson (e.g., having corners - Thinking Corner, Research Corner)

Question:

I heard and saw that some centres have a focused story throughout the Term to follow. For example, they focus on the story "3 Little Pigs" and they solve the problem of the wolves houses getting blown down. At the end of the term, they have an end product of a 'house' using available items (e.g., recyclable materials). Children are able to see their final product.

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Good practises:

Using 5W1H questions to get children to think about a given problem

Challenges:

Asking questions with 5W1H for children to look for problems that they can find in the classroom

Getting children to understand and find issues to resolve at home or in class,they tend to look for immediate problems and solutions.

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Good practices:

jotting down ideas on the board, drawings, children are more visual learners

Questioning techniques, prompting children to ask more questions using 5W1H

Recapped on SCAMPER every session

Challenges:

Most of the teachers are not trained in STEMIE. Can be difficult to understand the lesson plans at times.

The lesson time can be too short for children to explore.

Younger group children can’t seem to understand what’s going on.

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Good Practices:

-          Providing a variety of materials for children to explore and work with

-          Teachers rephrase questions to get answers from children

-          Use of pictorial and gave examples to get children to understand what is invention

-          Children start to ask questions to find out more information

Challenges:

-          Time-constraint

-          Answers children gave were not related to topic(N2 & K1)

-          Hard to guide children due to various needs of the children

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Good Practices:

Use of "questioning techniques" to prompt children and expound on their knowledge.

Providing variety of materials to explore and create prototypes during the invention. (Recycled materials, go box, research stations)

Children are excited to do STEMIE lessons as they are encouraged to create, brainstorm and research on the inventions and pitch about it.

Welcoming all ideas and not disregarding it. It helps children to try whether their ideas are workable or not. (trial & error)

Challenges:

For K2, the time to go in-depth with the invention is too packed as they have a lot of other programs going on.

For N2-K1 level, the children tend to have difficulty in brainstorming about giving solutions to the problem presented. They tend to give answers that are not related to the topic.

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Good practices:

outdoor learning was fun, children find out about inventions all around them

children unpacked the use and functions of inventions

they learned to ask why and why not questions

Challenges:

K2 level (Y2024) without basic foundation might not be able to keep up with the lesson plans

timetable

resources

NN Level : children display (how?)

K1 Level : invention log