To end the month of April, we have news to share about the recipient of our EdTech grant award! This month, the award goes to Save Our Children Elyria, an afterschool program in Elyria, Ohio! The group helps support K-12 students throughout Elyria City Schools with various academic and nutritional assistance year round and, since learning has moved largely online, they've created a virtual makerspace to help keep children engaged! They’ll be using various STEAM tools we provide through the grant to facilitate virtual small group meetings with students from the comfort of their homes!
SOC provides students with the opportunity to use STEM tools that they otherwise would likely not have and we're happy to help them create some new programming. At the moment, they’re working with over 100 K-12 students from around the district, many of whom are eligible to receive free or reduced school lunch. Like many families, they’re experiencing difficulty with keeping kids connected and engaged throughout COVID-19 school closures, leading to SOC applying for our grant for some assistance.
Of course, since remote learning began about six weeks ago, there was an immediate and high demand for support from the organization. Students were left without Internet access in many cases, without devices to access the Internet, and facing an increasingly widening connectivity gap. In an effort to combat this, SOC purchased 20 new Chromebooks, but then they needed something meaningful to do with them while students are out of school. Not the only ones in this boat, they've turned to grant opportunities to help.
They knew that they would have to adapt their efforts in order to keep kids engaged while schools across the district and across the country are closed—likely for the rest of the academic year. That led to them devising the idea to provide remote STEAM experiences for their students as often as possible. Members of the Save Our Children group have been distributing various educational kits to students once a week and, once we get them their new STEAM tools, those will be included in some of them!
At a high level, they’re going to be building a lesson plan around one particular STEAM tool each week and sending students the materials they need. Since they have been distributing materials electronically for over a month now, they came up with the idea to supplement the material kids are learning about with physical educational experiences. While it may be far from ideal, these children would not otherwise get the opportunity to keep up with their STEM education if it weren’t for this program designed by SOC.
As you might expect, this project is unlike any other we’ve helped facilitate as part of our grant program due to the remote nature of the teaching and learning that will ensue. Specifically, the fact that the employees from Save Our Children will be making deliveries to students’ homes is certainly unique and truly speaks to the high levels of commitment to children each member of their team has. Typically, they like to teach in a one-on-one style or in small group settings, but this is the next best thing and we definitely think it speaks volumes to their commitment of keeping STEM learning alive.
Although there is so much uncertainty surrounding this great distance learning experiment, the people at SOC have found the remote experiences they’ve tried so far to be highly effective, leading them to seek new ways of administering lessons to keep student engagement and excitement levels high. The students they serve still want to learn and Save Our Children has collectively done a lot to make sure this is possible, including applying for our grant. Adding some new STEAM tools to their offerings will help them create that variety that students are looking for at the moment and should be great for ensuring they don’t get complacent while learning from home by regularly providing something new.
While we haven’t yet finalized which STEAM kits they’ll be getting from our store, it looks like there will be a good variety of circuitry, electronics, music, 3D printing, engineering, robotics, and coding tools so that students and their families get to try experimenting with a variety of technologies! The Save Our Children organization has been helping students in Elyria, specifically, for close to 40 years and have helped them discover new interests and passions by drawing on STEM learning experiences.
We congratulate the Save Our Children program on being selected and encourage all educators and afterschool or summer program leaders to apply for our next grant award. The deadline to apply for the May award is May 20 and you can apply here. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions about our grant program and feel free to pass the link on to any members of your school community, especially those who would benefit from applying for grants. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all of the latest news surrounding our grant program and everything going on in the world of STEM education!