Early Childhood Specialists Cynthia Rubalcado and Isabel Cardona were awarded a $7,427 Education Foundation grant that will transform student learning in prekindergarten.
The grant was titled Rev Up STEAM Learning in Pre-K.
“Our idea was just to get this coding, early robotics opportunity, into the hands of our pre-k students. A lot of our schools and campuses have STEM labs being implemented, but a lot of them didn’t have something focused just for our pre-k, our youngest learners. That was where the idea came from. Let’s just really focus in on what would be appropriate for pre-k and that’s where we came up with this idea,” Cardona said.
The grant will impact six campuses — Milam, Zavala, Goliad, Hays, Pease and Fly, so that impacts 25 pre-k classrooms with approximately 550 students, Rubalcado said.
There are other robot opportunities in the district, such as Bee-Bots.
“With our Rev Up STEAM learning, we invested in a robot. It’s a little car … He’s an entry-level robot, and he’s made specifically for the youngest learners. What he does is we have these color sensors, so depending on what color they land on, it makes them move a different way,” Rubalcado said.
She added that each classroom will receive a set of eight that they can use as they wish in their classrooms. It comes with stickers that you can put on indi to customize it.
Cardona said their goal is to have students figure out different outcomes based on the color coding.
Rubalcado said a lot of the STEM labs are geared toward kindergarten through fifth-grade students.
“Some of our pre-k campuses, such as Lamar and Carver, have indi robots in those labs already. We wanted to just start with a little cohort of classrooms that are not going to get to have indi robot experiences,” Rubalcado said.
The indi starts on a green color sensor and you can move the sensors around according to what you want the robot to do.
Cardona said they also wanted to boost the campuses with pre-k to fifth grade students who might be missing that early learning part of the STEM or STEAM experience.
STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art and math. This would offer the experience to all students in the district, Rubalcado said.
“But a lot of our students in our district, they lack opportunities to learn the technical skills that they’re going to need … whenever they get older. … Sometimes we forget that we need to let our little ones be creative and show that side,”Rubalcado said.
Cardona said a lot of times people look at what the youngest learners do as play, but the students are learning through that developmentally appropriate play.
“We know that they’ll be able to explore, create and problem solve; all the things that children need to do, so we’re excited to let them try it out,” Cardona said.
Just bringing indi in supports the Texas pre-k guidelines.
“We made sure that we had correlation to those guidelines. For example, we have literacy. You can easily tie this into storytelling, identifying characters and events in the story, sequencing; and then we have math. We can bring in counting, measurement, patterning, spatial relationships. Something that is very important in pre-k is our social-emotional skills,” Rubalcado said.
Cardona added that it’s shown to be very effective in helping students stay focused on their task, as well as cooperating with their peers and problem solving together.
Rubalcado said it’s self-discovery, which is using the five senses while they’re in prekindergarten, which is a developmental milestone.
They are going to roll out the initiative during the teachers’ planning time and train them on how to use indi in the classroom, making sure they know there’s a lesson cycle. That consists of exploration, skill building and challenge completion.
After training, they will set up times to do classroom observations, see if students are engaged and see how they are being used.
Cardona said they also plan to get teacher feedback. Rubalcado said the idea of bringing indi into classrooms came from attending a Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) conference.
“When (we) saw this and the possibilities it can bring to our district, we thought it was a great idea to write a grant on that. One of our inspirations is … making sure that we’re providing that equitable access to high-quality resources,” Rubalcado said.
If all goes well, she added that they hope to have the robots in all the pre-k classrooms in the future.
When Cardona and Rubalcado were learning how to use the robots, it took some time and they went in the wrong direction a couple of times.
“But I’m really confident that the students … (will) get it because it’s … almost natural for them to do stuff like this,” Cardona said.
Rubalcado noted that if they don’t get it the first time, they’ll try something else.
They said they would encourage other people in the district to apply for foundation grants.
“Like we said, this is our first time to apply and you just never know if you’re going to receive it or not, but it doesn’t hurt to try. If it doesn’t work this time, we change it up a little and try for the next year,” Rubalcado said.
Cardona and Rubalcado said they have many ideas they would like to get out to the district for the coming year.
“… We want to make sure that we give each student opportunities especially with literacy and that foundation to get them kindergarten ready,” Rubalcado said.
They both want to thank the Education Foundation for giving them this opportunity.
At first, Cardona said writing a grant was a little intimidating.
“I would always (hear) about the grant writing and just never attempted it. Now that we’ve done it, we’re like okay, we can do this,” Cardona said. “It was really exciting when we are awarded and able to provide this for the students in our district.”
