Common Core Standards
Common Core Standards
Implement Strawbees projects with Common Core English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA) and Mathematics standards.
The Common Core standards covers both English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA) and Mathematics curriculum focusing in Kindergarten through 8th grade. Visit the Common Core page to view standards matched to student resources.
ELA Standards
Strawbees is easy to implement with Common Core alignment for a set of highly rigorous academic standards for U.S. school children in Kindergarten through 8th grade. The Common Core standards covered in Strawbees Classroom are for both English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA) and Mathematics curriculum.
Nonfiction Standards
All lessons inherently feature Informational Text Standards 3, 4, and 7. Students build designs and then are able to describe the relationship between the engineering and scientific concepts or the steps it took to build designs through self-assessment. There is additional student and teacher text in all lesson resources for each to help the students understand these complex and relevant non-fiction topics. All lessons feature vocabulary and high quality media used in the student’s handout, engaging in activating questions, and also in student journals documenting their experience. These features assure a rich learning experience for both teachers and students.
Fiction Standards With Ties to Social and Emotional Learning
There are lessons and activities dedicated to the creation of empathic and expressive robots. While building these robots, students are able to discuss feelings, motivation, and character traits. The robots allow for students to have a tangible way to engage with Literature Standard 3 . In addition, Standard 3 also has a strong relationship with Social and Emotional Learning (SEL).
As students, teachers, schools, and communities navigate through many challenges in life building self-awareness, adapting in unfamiliar situations, and learning new skills it is important that the curriculum allows for students and teachers alike to express and explore their feelings.
Writing Standards
Common Core Writing Standards detail that students should be responsible for producing opinion pieces, informative texts, and narrative texts with varying levels of support. In addition, many classrooms highlight writing to learn as a strategy to improve reading. All Strawbees lessons and activities are easily followed by a writing prompt. Furthermore, the Strawbees Classroom contains multiple opportunities for students to write using downloadable assets to help guide their thinking. Strawbees robotics in the form of lessons and activities may easily become characters for a child’s own imaginative narrative for storytelling.
Shake table from the Earthquake Simulator lesson.
Student journal as a downloadable asset to assign online or print as a handout to sketch and write.
Water wheel for grinding wheat grain for early childhood inventors.
Inquiry-based sketchbook to write and sketch solutions while building.
Math Standards
All Strawbees builds incorporate geometry. As students work through each lesson, they learn to decompose the shapes they are building, create in a variety of scales, and find real world examples and applications of the geometric shape. Furthermore, students gain a hands-on understanding of abstract concepts and practice spatial reasoning.
As students begin to code, they use algebraic operations and numbers and operations in base ten within the code. Strawbees’ coding cards offer challenges to help get students started. Students’ own creativity also allows them to explore mathematical operations as they choose. The mathematical possibilities that exist with coding with Strawbees are limitless with students’ imaginations.
Small bits of code in Makecode for exploring inputs and outputs of micro:bit.
Calculating speed with algebraic operations to gradually increase or decrease the servo motor’s back and forth motion in Makecode.
Assessment
Assessment within Strawbees is grounded in real-world, standards-driven learning. Instead of rote memorization or standardized testing, students have opportunities to demonstrate their skills within the coding platforms, by their own builds, or through their written responses.
Lesson resources contain multiple opportunities for students to write for assessing Common Core standards using downloadable assets to help guide their thinking with the list of science and engineering vocabulary plus Latin and Greek prefixes.
