We’re two weeks into Fall Program at the West Side STEM Learning Center at Bethel New Life (SLC) and It Takes a Village Leadership Academy in Bronzeville, and we’re already having moments of excitement, curiosity and connection!
STEAMbassadors help students with their homework when they first arrive at program. Photo by Angelica Juarez for Project Exploration.
At 3:00, when students first arrive at the SLC they are served a meal and start working on their homework from the day with our STEAMbassadors.
STEAMbassador Angela Guzman, center, helps students who also get a chance to meet and greet. Photo by Angelica Juarez for Project Exploration.
Students greet each other, staff and STEAMbassadors and decompress from a long day at school.
Students in Little Sisters4Science (3rd-5th grade) gather on a mat to discuss what they’ll be learning about this year. Photo by Angelica Juarez for Project Exploration.
For their first week, students are building relationships. In Little Sisters4Science (3rd-5th grade girls) this might look like putting together a list of community norms for the classroom.
In the Building Block Club (K-2) students cut out construction paper to make visuals expressing themselves. Photo by Liliana Lopez-Nino for Project Exploration.
In the Building Block Club students are getting creative, making visuals of their community norms together, learning how to work as a team, and having lots of laughs.
Laughter is the best medicine. Photo by Liliana Lopez-Nino for Project Exploration.
Lots and lots…
At It Takes A Village Leadership Academy in Bronzeville, students build a Play-Dough maze and had to solve it by blowing a ping-pong ball with a straw. Photo by Gabriela Ruiz for Project Exploration.
At It Takes A Village, students are getting to know each other through Teambuilding activities like Play Dough Maze, where students build a maze of their own design then swap mazes with another team to solve them together.
The students in the Building Block Program (K-2) also built a spaghetti tower where the challenge implementing a design process as a group. Photo by Gabriela Ruiz for Project Exploration.
They also built a spaghetti tower—first students had to sketch a plan together and then build the tower as a team.
For students, creating norms and taking on challenges as a team are essential to building a safe, welcoming and transformative learning environment where students, especially our Black and Brown students, feel like they belong, can express themselves and make mistakes!