STEAMed Magazine October 2016 | Page 30

The teachers in our magnet program for the arts and academic excellence recognized a need to explicitly foster creative thinking skills within our content. We determined that the process of incorporating visual arts to learn in a STEAM approach would be impactful. We implemented a goal to foster creativity by requiring students to combine or synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking. Analyzing and interpreting Leonardo da Vinci’s work has led the students to understand math and science in a more visual manner and has opened their eyes to the benefits of STEAM. Students have used sketch notebooks to demonstrate and conceptualize their learning of STEAM with geometry, formulas, motion, and to visually represent models that can be created to combine understandings. Additionally, students have engaged in independent research projects in which they’ve chosen a problem or topic to explore further and then created a sketch notebook page to work through their solutions, often ending in a product created and reaching to others through technology. Math Formulas 5th grade students learned about a variety of geometric math formulas including area, perimeter, volume, and surface area. At the end of the unit, students created a sketchnote to reflect on their learning from throughout the unit. Students purposefully organized their sketchnotes in a way that made sense and helped identify the relationships amongst their learning from throughout the unit. In the sketchnote to the left, you will see specific math vocabulary (area, perimeter, circumference, dilation, rotation, etc.) which this student learned during the unit. This student also connected the area of triangles and trapezoids along with the relationship between circles and cylinders which was above grade level content the student learned. This student also connected a variety of math symbols and equations into their sketchnote. STEAMed Magazine 30 October 2016 Edition