I spent my externship at the Children’s Museum of Idaho: building highly engaging educational activities and sometimes delivering activities alongside the program staff. CMI is a pretty awesome place. There’s a planetarium, dozens of things to build and build with, costumes for creative play, handleable live animals, and drop-in activities happening all day. Lots of energy, and lots of noise! I had some great experiences with that energy, working on the museum floor and in camps, but I spent about two thirds of my time doing the work of documentation and professional development.
In the area of documentation, my goals were to capture what already worked so that anyone could pick it up and teach it, and also to write brand new sequenced curriculum to encourage areas of growth for the museum. In both cases I wrote STEM lessons aligned to NGSS three-dimensional performance expectations, bundling a science and engineering practice, a disciplinary core idea, and a crosscutting concept. One part of the finished curriculum bundle is a museum floor activity bank: standalone fifteen-minute activities for ages three to eight, each one designed so a child can work alongside a caregiver and carry a finished project home. The other part of my finished package is multi-session curriculum proposed for camps and homeschool enrichment.
In the process I became a more disciplined writer of standards alignment, which is a rigor I can carry back into my own planning. I had to grapple with what it means to create educational material for a voluntary audience. I was inspired to protect the science vocabulary rather than water it down, and to maximize engagement through the structure of each activity.
My very favorite part of the externship was the opportunity to provide professional development to program staff. I built an afternoon of PD on the topic of learning through creative play, including how to read NGSS standards, explicit vocabulary instruction, and the small conversational moves that turn a craft table into a science conversation. It stretched my capacities while also giving me the opportunity to share my knowledge with an audience that can materially benefit.
I am grateful to the CMI team for inviting me to spend the summer with them, learning through play, and to the STEM Action Center for making it possible.