Kindergarten Lessons Ain’t What They Use to Be. Part II of My Blog Series about the STEM 5-E Lesson Plan.

Howard Gardener’s definition of intelligence uses 3 primary and overarching categories:

1. ability to create an effective product or service that is valued in a culture
2. set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life
3. the potential for finding or creating solutions to problems, which involves gathering new knowledge

The next two phases of the 5 E Lesson Plan are Explore and Explain. During these two phases, students will be asked to use and expand their intelligence to identify and develop concepts, processes and skills. During the 2^nd E (Explore) Phase students are required to actively explore their environments and manipulate materials. They will then connect the dots from Exploring to learning the lesson plans concepts. The teacher will give the students different opportunities to verbalize the lesson’s concepts and demonstrate the new behaviors and skills. Teachers will often rely on different methods to help students retain the information such as word charts, think-pair-share or graphic organizers. The 3^rd E (Explain) Phase should include intentional play which will allow children to develop self-regulatory skills, supports communication and fosters collaborative learning.

The 5-E Lesson Plan uses a constructivist approach. Constructivism is a learning strategy that was developed by Jean Piaget and become popular during the 1960s. The constructivist method or approach allows students to synthesize new understanding from prior knowledge and helps students build on the past to develop new information.