Chickens — yes, chickens — are helping students learn at this Harris County STEAM school
Leave it to a fourth-grader to cut through the education jargon and explain in simple terms why she thinks it’s better to attend a STEAM-certified school.
Pine Ridge Elementary School has become only the sixth elementary school and 10th overall in the state — and second in Harris County, along with New Mountain Hill Elementary School — to earn the prestigious designation from the Georgia Department of Education.
Educators say STEAM-certified schools excel in teaching science, technology, engineering, arts and math by guiding students through problem-solving projects involving state curriculum standards. Fourth-grader Reagan Gardner, however, uses more basic words to explain STEAM’s impact on her learning.
“At my old school, I hated it so much that I would pretend to be sick,” Reagan, in her second year at Pine Ridge, told the Ledger-Enquirer. “… But when I got to Pine Ridge, I started to love this school. I love the STEAM program. I love all the teachers here.”
Classwork at her previous school, Reagan said, usually was “workbooks, on a smartboard and with paper and pencil.”
But at Pine Ridge, students are immersed in yearlong projects that help them learn collaboration, communication and perseverance along with the interdisciplinary STEAM subjects. This year, those projects at the K-4 school in Ellerslie are:
- Kindergarteners take care of the school’s five chickens. They are conducting an experiment to find out how light and darkness affect egg production. They produced a play about their project to inspire the prekindergarten students to take it over next school year.
- First-graders plant and maintain gardens. They grow a variety of vegetables for school families to take home, along with the kindergarten eggs.
- Second-graders are creating a pollinator garden, with bees and butterflies, to promote plant growth at the school. They are conducting an experiment to determine the best spot for the pollinator garden.
- Third-graders are using solar energy to create a cooling station on the playground.
- Fourth-graders are studying aquaponics. They have an aquarium that recycles fish waste into fertilizer for the plants. When they discovered some flourishing plants suddenly weren’t doing well, they investigated the problem and determined they had an infestation of spider mites. They are researching that critter to figure out how to keep the spider mites away from the system.
The school’s Eagle Lounge has a chandelier made out of recycled water bottles and a garden-themed mural. Behind the aquarium is a makerspace for STEAM-related projects.
Fourth-graders are creating simple machines to allow even the shortest students to see the highest plants atop the aquarium.
“You get to do more sophisticated stuff,” Pine Ridge fourth-grader Jeremiah Head told the L-E. “… It also gets us more in depth with what we’re learning.”
Although they are only 10, Reagan and Jeremiah still are impressed by their school’s STEAM certification.
“It’s really cool,” Reagan said.
“Yeah,” Jeremiah said. “Lots of bragging rights.”
Principal’s perspective
Jackie Lintner has been Pine Ridge’s principal for seven years and started teaching at the school 28 years ago.
“We’ve come such a long way from isolated projects with toothpicks and marshmallows to interdisciplinary units of study that are meaningful,” she said. “The kids take ownership of their learning, and they learn that mistakes are OK; it’s part of the learning process and to stick with it.”
Lintner emphasized that the teachers must show how the projects align with the state curriculum.
“This is all standards-driven,” she said. “We’re not off on a tangent. Through questioning, we have to steer the kids in the right direction.”
Teachers also must collaborate more effectively for the projects to successfully convey the content, Lintner said.
“It’s a total mindset overhaul of how we plan,” she said.
Teacher’s perspective
Third-grade teacher Brantley Sawyer has worked at Pine Ridge for eight years. She cochairs the school’s STEAM committee with fourth-grade teacher Katie Sizemore and first-grade teacher Alexis Wells.
Receiving the validation for the committee’s four years of hard work, Sawyer said, “was a good little pat on the back. You’re doing it right. You’re doing what’s best for your students. You’re doing what’s best for your community.”
Beyond the certification, striving to obtain it transformed the school’s learning environment, Sawyer said.
“It’s been a real challenge to us as the teachers to learn how to integrate all the subject areas and to get arts in there,” Sawyer said. “We’re not specialists in art, but to start dipping our toe into that, I think for some of us who maybe felt stale, for lack of a better word, it challenged us to figure out new ways and to make it relevant.”
For example, one of the state standards for third grade involves studying rocks and minerals. So the third-grade classes figured out how to solve the playground’s erosion problem by stacking more rocks along the border.
“I was still able to give them that content that used to bore me, and now they’re engaged and I’m engaged — and they’re actually retaining it,” Sawyer said. “You notice a spike in whatever skill they use in their project.”
To maximize the learning opportunities, the projects must be something the students care about, Sizemore said.
“When we did the recycling project a few years ago, they will talk about recycling and how it impacted the community as well, not just our school,” she said.
The hands-on learning encourages all types of students: the accelerated ones who continually seek dynamic experiences and the struggling ones who might feel frustrated by the traditional curriculum.
“A lot of times they (the struggling students) become the kid who’s doing the best at it,” Sawyer said. “… It builds their confidence a lot because they’re solving things.”
State perspective
Meghan McFerrin, a STEM/STEAM program specialist at the Georgia Department of Education, praised Pine Ridge for its commitment to “continuous improvement.”
“Though they have earned certification, they are eager to continue to progress and provide engaging and impactful learning experiences for students,” she told the L-E via email. “Students expressed enthusiasm about the projects they were engaged in and could speak to how projects reinforced understanding of mathematics, science, ELA (English language arts) and arts concepts.”
Having two of the state’s six STEAM elementary schools shows Harris County is committed to spreading this style of learning throughout the district, McFerrin said. She credits two Harris County educators — instructional technology coordinator Erin Miley and instructional technology specialist Rebecca Harmon — for being “extremely knowledgeable about the certification process and the change in school culture required for program sustainability.”
No other Columbus area school is STEAM certified. Two elementary schools in Muscogee County — Dimon and Hannan — are STEM certified.
