Driving to Success with Social and Emotional Learning
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Driving to Success is a self-contained STEM module. The module focuses on teaching algebra, graphing and other math concepts using a wooden car as a mathematical manipulative. The car allows the students to be creative and express their individuality. The students design, construct and then paint/decorate their own car. Creativity is an essential part of mathematics and science that few children are allowed to explore. Once the creative connections are made within the child’s mind, anything is possible.
Social and emotional learning is a teaching methodology that helps students to make positive and responsible decisions and develop healthy relationships with others. Social and emotional learning consist of six components:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Management
- Social Awareness
- Relationship Skills
- Responsible Decision-Making
- Future Self
Our STEM modules are designed for children to work in teams on a creative and academically rigorous project. The trifecta of teamwork, creativity and academic rigor foster peer-to-peer communication on the task at hand.
Implementing Social and Emotional STEM learning can be challenging. Which is where we come into play. Our combination of creativity and academic rigor make our exercises fun but challenging enough that teamwork is required for success. The Driving to Success by Making Math Easy STEM Module touches on each of the six Social and Emotional Learning components.
The first step in Driving to Success is to design and build your own individual car. This touches on self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness. When a student is designing the car, they are expressing themselves into the educational manipulative, the car. This self-expression during the educational process empowers them to take ownership of their education. Each student owns their own car, they own the design and build process, the outcomes are based on their direct inputs into the project.
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Self-Awareness: the ability to understand your own emotions and to develop a positive self-concept. When designing the car, the student must make decisions. These decisions have impact on the cars ability to function. Furthermore, their decisions will impact on how the car is viewed and received by their peers and teachers.
A desire to receive positive impact on how the car looks and works will guide the students through failure and frustration. Self-management, is reinforced, getting angry with the car, your classmates and most importantly themselves won’t lead to success and the desired positive reinforcement.
Finally, social awareness, as the kids design and build their cars, they will obviously peek over at what their classmates will be doing. They will ask questions amongst themselves and offer each other help. Thus, fostering healthy academic competition within the classroom and values of teamwork.
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Are you going to follow the instructions? Will you work with you fellow classmates? These are essential skills for life. Every student is responsible for their own car, if they break a wheel or glue the wheels, these things will have serious consequences when the students race their cars. The creative exercise ignites the students intrinsic desire to participate and succeed; no one wants to have a broken car and or ugly car.
Teamwork facilitates the development of relationship skills. The children will learn that positive relationships and good communication will lead to success. The workbook guides the students through inner and intra team competitions. The students will have to work with themselves for their individual success and work their classmates for the success of the team.
Lastly but certainly not least is the notion of future self. The ability to have fun expressing your creativity, being forced to work through the academic and creative challenges with your classmates and guides students to have a positive and realistic sense of their future selves. Our modules are designed to make everyone winners. These are not tests but rather fun creative exercises to reinforce what is being already taught in the classroom, in a hands-on 3-dimensional way. All a student needs to do is take the time to work through everything to succeed and envision a positive version of their future selves.
We develop STEM modules that guide your people through the process of acquiring and applying the knowledge, skills, and mentality to develop healthy self-images, regulate their emotions, feel the power of achieving personal and team goals, see the power of empathy, establish, and maintain supportive relationships and make responsible decisions.