The Lower School at CCS continues to make strides in the area of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) for our students. In addition to our classrooms being outfitted with large screen Apple TV’s along with an iPad and Surface laptop for each teacher, we have made available to our Lower School students a class set of iPads for our primary students and a set of laptops for our intermediate students. Our Early Childhood Department, along with our Spanish class, also received first response systems that make their educational experience fun and interactive! Our traditional computer class has morphed into our Technology class. Students now have weekly technology instruction in our computer lab where they learn various skills from keyboarding to media presentation software to digital citizenship to coding! Our Library is also in the next stage of becoming a full and complete Media Center. This school year we added thirteen new laptops and work tables for students to use for research. We have also increased our teacher professional development by focusing part of our trainings on how best to implement technology with our students. Using the funds from our Lancer Fun Run this November, our next phase is to increase our teacher trainings while adding more laptops with specific research databases that are age-appropriate, to create work stations within the Media Center for students to work collaboratively, and to make the Media Center and its Director a resource for Lower School teachers to take their classroom lessons to another level. We have also added after-school club offerings that focus on STEM. Meeting twice a week is our first ever FLL (First Lego League) team sponsored by engineer and CCS parent, Mr. Howard Petree. This team competes against other teams in the state, tackling real world problems using concepts learned from STEM as well as team collaboration. We have also offered this semester a Robotics after school club led by local robot expert Coach Bill Shaw. This club offers kids the opportunity to learn teamwork, engineering skills, programming, problem solving, and critical thinking skills while having fun building robots. This club filled up first semester so sign up early for January’s class! Future plans for advancing STEM in the Lower School include partnering with various organizations to improve the teaching of STEM and to expand our after-school offerings. We look forward to an amazing second quarter!
