The Harker School’s preschool has a STEM lesson on honeybees.

After our preschoolers showed curiosity about all the honeybees on campus, our STEM teacher folded a honeybee lesson into her curriculum. She works in collaboration with classroom teachers to introduce new concepts in the four important areas that comprise our STEM lab and farm. For science, children experience plant and animal life cycles through investigations in the lab and through gardening/animal care on the farm. Technology is taught by the children learning that people use tools to accomplish different tasks, and they themselves use magnifying classes, thermometers, scales, rakes, hoes, shovels and a water pump. Children have opportunities to learn engineering by making predictions, asking questions and investigating the physical properties of objects in order to solve problems related to cause and effect; this happens through the use of building blocks, ramps and balls, marble tracks, and other construction manipulatives. Children experience and understand math through spatial relationships, shapes, patterns, comparisons, measurements and number concepts. This learning is through the use of pattern blocks, pattern beads, building blocks, sequencing activities, using measurement tools and sorting objects.