My kids love doing STEM projects.  We even started our own tiny STEM club this year so that we’d be sure to incorporate STEM on a regular basis (because, face it, finding good plans and collecting the needed materials can be challenging).  That’s why I was super excited to give Tied 2 Teaching‘s STEM Activities, Full Year of Challenges with Close Reading!

There are more than 65 challenges in this product – more than enough for a full year of STEM learning.  They are organized by the creators in monthly clusters; it’s actually a bundle of monthly STEM challenges, and so they tend to line up with the holidays in each month.  The February challenges are primarily about love, valentines, and groundhogs, for example.

Each challenge is structured the same way.  The student is sent to the website Wonderopolis to read an article about related information.  Then there’s a worksheet to check comprehension of the article, and then the STEM fun begins. 

The forms walk the student through the engineering design process to make the best possible answer to the challenge.  They come in a few different layouts, and I really appreciated this as it made it possible to differentiate where needed.

The challenges themselves take a few different forms.  Some of them are building brick-based, so you need to have building blocks to complete the challenges; you know the ones I’m talking about.

Others are more about the appearance of the object that you create; you’re supposed to build something that fits certain appearance criteria, but it doesn’t actually have to do or solve anything.

My kids most loved the hardest ones, though: the ones where there more criteria involved.  This definitely upped the ante.  With these, the challenge was to build something that would solve a problem.

The first challenge we tried, because it was near Valentine’s Day, was the Candy Box challenge.  The idea was that you built a box in which to carry a bag of candy.  That was the only requirement, and the extreme open-endedness of it compared to the other STEM projects that we’ve done made it very difficult for My Little Man.  He couldn’t settle on which materials to use or how to do it and spent a very long time not coming up with much of anything.  He had fun, but I’m not sure how much he got out of the process.

I looked for one with more parameters for his next challenge, and we chose the Foil Boat Challenge.  He loved this one and took it far beyond the directions!  He immediately folded his foil into a barge-like boat with short sides and began to test it out. 

He found that his boat could hold a lot of pennies before it sank!  He took note of the spot where the water came over first, refolded to make that spot higher, and retested.  

He retested to see if his adjustments made a difference, and then decided to try a different coin to see how the numbers would compare.  Then he asked for my digital scale, and he figured out how much weight his foil boat could hold, and how the weight of the pennies compared to the weight of the other coins.  He really loved this challenge!

Next, we tried the Alien Spacecraft Design Challenge.  Both kids participated in this one, and they loved it!  My Big Helper made a very detailed sketch of her plan, and she worked hard to pull it together just like that.  

When it was time to test it, we used Gummi Bears (we didn’t have any Sour Patch Kids) but we loved our little Gummi Bear Aliens.  Can you see him on the ladder in the craft above?

My Big Helper built seats for her alien bears in the center of the craft above.  They were well secured and stayed inside the craft when it was dropped from different heights!

My Little Man reverse-engineered a parachute, sort of.  He hot-glued the sticks together to create a landing pad, and then attached the cup as a seat for his bears, but put the plate on the bottom of the whole thing so that the plate could create air resistance.  It worked really well!  I loved how well he could explain the whole thing to me.

The next challenge that we tried was a really fun one for us.  We all love ropes courses and zip lines, and there’s a challenge about that!  My Big Helper chose this one, and I really liked the parameters: to build a container for a ping pong ball so that it can travel down a 4-foot-long zip line in under five seconds.

My Big Helper had fun building the zip line itself first, and then she spent some time testing how to make things slide along it quickly.  She tested whether the weight should be in front of, directly under, or behind the connection to the line itself.  

Her actual creation was very simple – a cup with the ping pong ball inside, connected to the zip line with a clamp, the line running through a hole at the top.  After all of her testing, it worked very well and slid quickly down the line.

My kids really liked these STEM challenges.  They look forward to doing a new one each week, and My Little Man has already declared Friday to be STEM Day. They were simple but fun with great potential for learning.  We’ve enjoyed the introduction to Wonderopolis, too, and we’re now big fans.

I particularly love the variety in the challenges.  My Little Man is at the upper end of the targeted grade level, and My Big Helper a few years above, but it’s easy to modify them up to fit them.  Now that we see how they work, we’ll try more of the simpler design challenges, too – I’ll just add my own parameters to make them suit us.

The variety and simplicity makes that kind of differentiation easy to do, and I like that.  It’s rare that I find a super-detailed lesson plan that really works for us, and those are hard to personalize.  This is easy, but with the Wonderopolis reading and the design and reflection sheets, you’re not sacrificing structure or learning.

I’ve not seen other STEM challenges that come with related ELA work, and that is my favorite aspect of this product.  Even when you choose a really ‘fun’ challenge theme, you’re still incorporating both ELA and STEM!

Another great aspect of these challenges is the wide range of themes.  Because of this, it’s easy to match the STEM challenges with other parts of your curriculum or approaching holidays.  There are also fun challenges relating to monuments, buildings, animals, robots, and more – really kid-friendly things.  My kids were excited to see challenges related to some of their favorite things, and that made the challenges even more fun.  

You can’t beat the price of this STEM bundle, either.  If you plan to do STEM projects on a regular basis, definitely check out this bundle.  With the challenges ready to go for you, this is a deal!

Don’t take my word for it, though – click on the graphic below to read more reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew!