The “Naša Radost” Preschool organisation (Šumica kindergarten) is for the first time joining the STEM Discovery Week with two projects: “A STEM story” and “Meses kalandok”! In the first project, we will use a Scientix resource about water experiments, and the second is an eTwinning project with 3 other project partners.

  ” MESES KALANDOK”  (Fairytale adventures)

From 8-19 th April ,2019

https://twinspace.etwinning.net/86284/home

This project was a collaboration between 4 countries: Serbia, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. We came to the idea around the Digital Theme week which was organized in Hungary in April, and we chose to make a mini-eTwinnig project for easier communication and collaboration. The main idea was to make a project about Hungarian fairytales, but in an innovative, modern and digital way. The age of the included children was from 5-9.

First, we chose a specific story (“The little rooster and his half penny”)  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.littlerooster&hl=hu

The children had to introduce themselves (with web tools), make a logo, a poster, a collaborative story (An online e-book), to act out the story in a coding-maze, to find a treasure (With QR codes), to illustrate the story (for a virtual gallery)… and many, many more exciting things. We did not forget the engineering element, so we built the sultan’s castle tower too. The aim of the project and the pedagogical value was to show to children and involved parents too, that the “old-fashioned” storytelling and the modern digital way is not excluding the other one.

https://www.nasaradost.edu.rs/aktivnosti/digitalna-tematska-nedelja/

“A STEM story” 

From 18th March to 26th April

https://twinspace.etwinning.net/81087/home

The idea for this STEM Discovery Week activity came from an etwinning project where we tried to come up with solutions for real-life problems with the help of stories. The main characters of our stories were two 5-year-olds (Marco & Sophia) who are having some difficulties: they cannot come across the road, do not have an elevator in their building, or cannot enjoy their picnic because there is no bridge across the river etc.

From this etwinning project, we choose a specific story and decided to work on it a little bit more.

My kindergarten group ( The “Ladybugs”) are 20 five-year-olds. They were fascinated with the 2nd story of the project where the main characters could not go to the picnic because there was no bridge across the river. We already built some bridges in the first STEM story, so we wanted them to concentrate on building some kind of a raft.

How to build a raft, a boat, a ship? First of all, we had to choose the materials. I chose a SCIENTIX resource to help us.  (http://www.scientix.eu/resources/details?resourceId=3181 ). In this resource, we find very good material for children’s experiments. This seven-sequence module offers the opportunity to study the floatability conditions for various objects. We learned about mass, volume etc. and had a lot of fun along the way. We shared our knowledge with other project partners: we made a “SINK OR FLOAT” quiz with SKYPE. The local TV filmed the event. 

Experimenting with water inspired us to explore the other aspects: how to froze or melt water? For that we tried to froze some toys in water , and after we had to free them (melt) from ice.