STEM Lab Week

During the week of March 11-15, the lower school students invited their parents to join them during their STEM Lab class for the school’s first STEM Lab Week. This special week was designed as a time for students to become the teachers and parents to become the students.  Various activities and experiments were set up throughout the lab and the students were able to teach their parents about all of the wonderful, hands-on learning going on in the STEM Lab.  

It was so exciting to watch the students take over the classroom.  Here are some of the activities that happened in the lab during STEM Lab Week.   

Junior Kindergarten - Sorting with colors, sizes, and shapes; Healthy Foods iPad activities

Kindergarten - Locating coordinates to measure the depth of the ocean floor and Animal iPad activities 

Grade 1 - Designing strong walls by testing sand, soil, and clay mortars; Light/Eye iPad activities

Grade 2 - Creating spectrograms to be read and played on hand-made sound boxes; Sound iPad activities

Grade 3 - Designing simple machines out of LEGOs

Grade 4 – Creating a schematic diagram representing a complete alarm circuit and following the diagram to build the circuit

Grade 5 - Using the Virtual Heart iPad App which showed how the heart beats before and after exercise, and creating cell membranes

Photos from this fun week of science are posted online in the STEM Lab Photo Gallery. Please Click here to view.

Mrs. Dana Brickner
Lower School STEM Lab Coordinator

Charlotte Christian School has adopted as one of its key academic initiatives, “The Development of 21st Century Thinkers.” This initiative focuses specifically on the skills of: critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration.

Critical thinking as a skill in education has a long history evidenced by the following statement made in 1906 by then Yale professor William Graham Sumner. “Critical thinking is the examination and test of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not. The critical faculty is a product of education and training. It is a mental habit and power. It is a prime condition of human welfare that men and women should be trained in it. It is our only guarantee against delusion, deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly circumstances.”

At the heart of Charlotte Christian School’s mission is the task of “equipping and developing students to effectively integrate biblical truth and learning into their daily lives.” All education involves communicated content that carries with it underlying fundamental assumptions and values or a worldview. Skills in critical thinking, or examining such assumptions and values in light of the Truth of God’s Word, is imperative to the fulfillment of such a mission. Our focus isn’t on mindlessly indoctrinating students in God’s Truth; but rather, “…to impact the culture for Christ.”

At Charlotte Christian we believe it is vital to teach the skill to “see” as a critical thinker, and the enhancement of this skill takes place through a variety of means. On a daily basis it is done through,

• teaching critical reading, listening, or observation with emphasis always placed on learners as active (rather than passive) participants.
• identifying what is being said (either explicitly or implicitly), and the asking of probing questions to understand underlying assumptions, meanings of terms, sources of information, justification for truthfulness, as well as resulting inferences and implications.

The four questions we always want our students to ask are:

1. What do you mean by that?
2. Where did you get your information?
3. How do you know you are right?
4. What if you are wrong?

We treat our students with intellectual respect and give them the freedom to ask the hard questions, whether it be about the Christian faith or problem solving in their classes. We work to create an atmosphere where students are not afraid to ask the tough questions and allow them to wrestle with the big issues.

We constantly want our students to delve deeper into a topic or subject. In addition to daily classroom work, critical thinking is enhanced through work on special projects or papers where extended time is provided for personal reflection and response. Students experience this leveled thinking for example in science lab where the hands on style of learning creates a high level of student engagement, questioning and problem solving. Or in language arts class when students learn how to identify the author’s point of view and if their statements are justified. In the Christian Philosophy and Apologetics Class, seniors are encouraged to make their Christian faith their own through investigating the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity and taking a critical look at the worldviews that permeate the cultures of this world. Our students are given the freedom to think about, wrestle with, and apply the Truth of the Christian faith to all of life using essential critical thinking skills.

Our fourth grade students recently welcomed fourth grade students from Greenway Park Elementary School as part of a collaboration formed between the two schools.  The schools began the partnership in the early fall as a way to build community and encourage students to learn from other children their own age. 

The students first became acquainted as pen pals and communicated with their “buddies” through letters to one another.  On Dec. 12, the students from Greenway Park traveled to our campus for a morning of fun activities with the Charlotte Christian students.  The children were paired with their buddies and rotated among multiple stations where they learned about Native Americans, created rock crystal as part of a STEM science lab, competed in relay races, designed paper snowflakes, and decorated cupcakes.

Our fourth grade students will have the opportunity to travel to Greenway Park in February to share time with their new friends. 

Fourth grader Kate Carlson shared that her favorite part of the day was meeting her new friend Zamouria and playing with her during the recess games in the gym. Kate had already written a letter to Zamouria and asked lots of questions about her favorite color and her favorite animals.  “I think it was cool that we got to connect with other kids and start to build relationships with them,” she shared.  Kate is looking forward to visiting her new friend when they travel to Greenway in February.  “I am excited about seeing their school and their classroom.  It will be lots of fun,” she shared.

It was a wonderful day for our fourth grade students and they are excited about visiting Greenway.  I was proud of how they were true disciples of Christ to our guests.  Our students have really enjoyed the opportunity to meet new friends through this collaboration.  The partnership allowed the fourth grade students to put the school verse of John 13:35 into action, “For they will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”