Meet Kellie Taylor, an elementary teacher in Emmett, Idaho for the past fourteen years, She taught in the general classroom for first, second, and third grade before teaching engineering to kindergarten through fifth grade students the past six years. She is a Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow working at the Library of Congress.
A farewell from Einstein Fellow Kellie Taylor with suggestions for locating resources for science, technology and engineering teachers.
To begin the second half of the school year, Teaching with the Library of Congress highlights recent Library of Congress initiatives and selected blog posts that might spur some classroom activities or lesson plan ideas.
Alexander Graham Bell’s notebooks capture the effort he put into designing and testing aerial possibilities. He was able to identify what worked – and what did not – through the engineering design process.
Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collection was established in 1969 by the National Park Service, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Library of Congress. The collection documents historic sites and structures related to engineering and industry focusing less on the building fabric and more on the machinery and processes within.
In his quest for knowledge, Alexander Graham Bell meticulously documented his experiments through correspondence and journals. Studying these documents can lead to insights into his processes and approaches to recording his work as well as deeper understanding of particular experiments or inventions.
What would it be like to walk city streets without streetlights? or to read a book or do homework by candle light? Elementary students may struggle to understand the many changes that electricity brought about in homes and industry, but focusing on the changes brought by electric lighting may be easier for them.
With the use of the engineering design process in science instruction and the advent of the maker movement, students are asked to identify problems and develop solutions. Solutions can be refined and improved through testing and modifications. The hands-on nature of working through the engineering design process can be engaging, but identifying or finding problems can be a difficult task for students.
Ask students to observe the photograph of Mary Hallock Greenewalt. What will they see? While we can see there is a machine and a woman, it is difficult to determine the components of the machine or what it may have been used for, which generates a lot of questions.
The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) will host its annual conference in St. Louis on April 11-14 and there are many ways for attendees – and everyone – to learn more about what the Library of Congress offers to science teachers.