I’m super excited to share this lesson!  I love STEAM projects and shared my digital task journal to make STEAM more reading and research-based so that it fits better into the Reading and Language Arts classroom in an earlier post.  This is the lesson that I used to first implement this idea and it worked SO WELL!   This lesson includes a Growth Mindset read aloud and discussion, task journal prompts that require the students to be text dependent, reflective, and to apply the information they learn from their research, and to use that information to analyze their own success or lack of success throughout the STEAM process.  This is totally higher level thinking!  I was able to find texts that ALL of my students could read (in a 4th grade classroom with reading levels ranging between two grade levels) and I was even able to find research passages that still allowed me to assess comprehension skills we were working on and incorporate the STEAM project into my reading groups to continue working on close reading skills.  Suggestions and links for research texts are included in the lesson.  This is what reading SHOULD BE!  I’ll be working on more of these lessons to continue incorporating STEAM into the reading classroom and can’t wait to share them!

To get my Flight School reading STEAM lesson and task journal, click here.