Submitted by WET Science Center
Does the world inspire your child to ask questions, experiment, make art, and invent? Then they’re a natural at STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math). STEAM is about curiosity, creativity, and innovation! Explore STEAM with this week’s WET Science Center Rediscovering Science activities, or with a 7 Days of STEAM printed activity packet. The packets are available outside the WET Science Center Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
STEAM isn’t only found in a lab. STEAM is all around us, everywhere you look. This week, follow along with our Rediscovering Science activities to:
- Design a musical instrument
- Create technology for scientific endeavors
- Engineer a robotic hand
- Experiment with liquid density
In the 7 Days of STEAM packet you’ll find:
- Easy at-home experiments
- Coloring and a word search
- How to Build a Marble Maze, this week’s featured activity.
When do children use STEAM skills?
Kids regularly engage in STEAM without even knowing it. Science, technology, engineering, art and math all work together to help explain our world. Do your children like to draw, cook, or build?
Drawing is a method of understanding a subject, or model, and being able to demonstrate it to others.
Cooking is chemistry that relies on personal taste and texture preferences to find the ideal solution and process.
When building a Lego tower or sand castle, kids are engaging in every aspect of STEAM: counting LEGOS, calculating how to make a sand castle structurally sound, asking what they want to build and why, testing ideas along the way, using technology like buckets and shovels to support the construction, and applying an artistic eye throughout the process.
STEAM and Wastewater
All the water you use that goes down a drain in a home, school, or business, is wastewater. This ranges from the water flushed down a toilet, to the water you use to wash your clothes. Wastewater in Lacey, Olympia, Tumwater, and parts of Thurston County goes down the drain to LOTT Clean Water Alliance where it is cleaned before being released into the Salish Sea.
LOTT needs all kinds of thinkers, doers, and scientists to clean wastewater and protect the Salish Sea’s water quality. Water quality analysts, operators, technicians and engineers are just a few of the critical STEAM careers working together to achieve this goal
From a steamy shower, to soapy dishes, how much wastewater do you make in a day? Have your children make observations throughout the day and determine how much water is used in your home with our Wastewater Calculator. You might be surprised at how quickly it adds up. Are there ways that you can save water at home?
