STEM is an interdisciplinary method and helps the students to gain engineering skills. So that STEM takes the interest of teachers. There are some teachers who work on STEM in Turkey. On the other hand there are a lot of teachers who are curious about STEM. However, I see from my observations that our teachers need sample lesson plans for good STEM examples.

Scientix is a very useful portal to find good materials. For this reason, I have searched for STEM plans which will be suitable for our primary school students within the Scientix repository. Among them, I selected a lesson plan named “What is time”. I asked a primary teacher, who works with 4th grade students, to apply this lesson plan in his class.
Of course, this teacher is an enthusiastic and curious teacher to apply new methods. We talked about how the plan should be implemented. This activity is adequately crafted for the teacher. Nonetheless, teachers who decide to apply this kind of lesson plan may find it difficult to use instructions if they don’t have enough knowledge about inquiry-based
learning. This lesson plan, which we found in the repository, also includes a worksheet for the student. This was very useful for measuring student gains.

After the lesson plan was applied in the classroom, we reviewed the worksheets. In this lesson plan, it was aimed to gain the idea that we need a tool to measure the time by conducting activities on the concept of time. The teacher asks the students to do an hourglass towards the end of the lesson. Students who will make the hourglass have determined the materials they can use firstly. Then they imagined that how to make an hourglass with these materials in their minds and designed it on worksheet. Some students drew very detailed designs. But some of them didn’t draw in details. In such an activity, every student who does not have enough details in her/his drawing will see the
deficiencies in her/his drawing after starting work.

Thus, students will plan their works by thinking about more details while making new designs in their future works. For this reason, this lesson plan is also effective in providing the students to gain the ability to plan. The hourglass prepared by the students was quite beautiful and successful. The lesson plan attracted students’ attention. However, when checking the worksheets, we observed that the students could not give the desired answers about the limits of the hourglass. Mostly, teachers finish the lesson in their mind when students present a product. However, it is also important that the product is well understood by the students.

As an institution, we organize teacher trainings and seminars in our district. We decided to give a seminar to share the data we have about this lesson plan with another primary school. And we selected a school for this seminar. There were two reasons why we chose this school. Because the school is not very central, so that teachers need more support in here. Also the school consists of disadvantaged students.

In this seminar also Scientix Ambassador Filiz Şentürk told the teachers about Scientix. Teachers were informed about how to search for various materials within the Scientix portal. Detailed information was given about the lesson plan. This seminar was on 26/04/2019 with the name of “How to apply a stem plan?”

You can check Scientix Repository to find useful materials for your lessons. And if you want to check the lesson plan which we used in this activity https://astroedu.iau.org/en/activities/1606/what-is-time/

Mustafa ACAR