Summer of STEM at Muskegon Montessori Academy for Environmental Change

We at Muskegon Montessori Academy for Environmental Change are so proud of our school community for another incredible school year. We’re already hard at work getting our building ready for both familiar and new smiling faces. With another year of learning on the way, we wanted to share some fun ways to keep students engaged while they’re on break.

The Summer Slide is a phenomenon explained as the loss of academic gains from the previous school year over summer break. Though it can’t be helped that students forget things in their time away from class, there is plenty that families can do to encourage active learning in that time. What better a way to keep children engaged than to give them a hands-on lesson on concepts like physics, chemistry, mathematics and more!

Tin Can Ice Cream
Homemade Ice Cream! With a list of easy-to-find ingredients including items that may lie around the house already, this is a fantastic example of teaching ideas like states of matter, chemical reactions and properties of chemicals like salt.

Access the following link for access to: required ingredients, step-by-step instructions and more. 

Homemade PVC Bow
Homemade bow-and-arrow from PVC pipe, string and a few other household items! This activity not only teaches your student about things like: types of energy, physical properties and more, it also shows them the fun to be found in physics.

The following link will help you: gather materials, show you how to assemble the project and explain the ‘why’ behind how a bow-and-arrow works to your child.

Rock Candy from Home
Grow your own rock candy at home! With the shortest list of materials yet, this is a fun and exciting way to teach your child about key concepts like crystal structures, chemical properties and applications in everyday life.

This next link includes: a full list of resources, step-by-step directions and questions that coincide with the experiment to challenge your student to critically think.

There are hundreds upon thousands of experiments to catch your students’ eye this summer. From at-home demonstrations to pre-assembled experiment kits, we hope that our listed activities above help keep your students’ expertise striving and not sliding.