5.2 Lesson planning

Create multiple learning activities for each goal

Once you have defined the learning goal, create activities that you know will help achieve the goals. Include different actions for each objective so that each child may find an approach that suits him or her best. Make the activities as engaging and exciting as possible. Today we really need to attract and keep the children’s attention.

The AutoSTEM project provides many opportunities for the development of motivation for STEM, creative thinking, problem-solving, comprehension ability, and cultural awareness as well as transversal values such as recycling.

You can download a template for a lesson plan here.

An essential tool that helps children cope with tomorrow’s challenges is the ability to think. To achieve the curriculum goals, children need to know different aspects of life to understand themselves and their world. Cross-curricular links have an integrative effect on children, helping them understand the world and acquire life skills. One of the current trends that pedagogues promote is to create learning situations in which children are engaged in discussion and problem-solving of people’s real-life problems. Integrity in training is closely related to one of the critical competencies: initiative and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship refers to an individual’s ability to turn ideas into action and includes creativity, innovation, risk-taking, and the ability to plan and manage projects.

Recommendations

  • Include material that the children are familiar with, but provoke their curiosity and discovery.
  • Remember to use children’s precursor knowledge from time to time. The best practice for recalling older information is to include it in learning something new that the children need to address in the lesson.
  • Add variety to your usual lesson plans – diversifying the learning process. By including additional AutoSTEM activities, the teacher implements an interdisciplinary lesson.
  • Avoid conducting a series of lessons that use the same techniques.
  • It is desirable from the very beginning of children’s education to understand interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity to build the right attitude in children to understand the world.

The activities included in the AutoSTEM Project create prerequisites for providing integrated knowledge.

Introductory event

When presenting the project, you may motivate the children with an “introductory event”. It engages the children’s interest and provokes asking questions. The event can be a scientific fact, a short story, an image, an event, a film, a video, a question, etc. Be creative in presenting the chosen automata!

Motivating question or problemChildren’s opinion and choice
The question should be
  • provocative,
  • open-ended,
  • complex
  • and related to the essence of what you want the children to learn.
Without a motivating question, the children might not understand why they shall work on the project.		For the project to make sense for the children, it is essential to consider their opinion, choice and precursor knowledge.
In cases where children’s choice is limited, they can at least choose which aspects to focus on within the lesson’s more general topic. Or they can choose how to design, create and present their automata.

Task

Choose one of the automata and a STEM topic. Plan a lesson for your class about the chosen topic using the chosen automaton.

Here you find examples of lessons that we have carried out with 7-11-year-old children at 32 SU School “Sv.Kliment Ohridski” in Sofia, Bulgaria.

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