STEM(in) with Steph

  Cooking Up Nutrition! Spinach Pops, with kale, chia seeds, OJ, yogurt, peaches, and bananas! Yum! This last week I was invited to help conduct a nutrition camp at the newly constructed CSU Orchard Mesa Research Center in Grand Junction. In partnership with Amanda McQuade at Community Alliance for Education and Hunger Relief and CSU Extension Family and Consumer Science Agent Ann Duncan, we hosted 25 3rd-6th graders for a 2 day healthy eating and cooking camp! Picking peppers for the food bank While there, we picked our own produce from the garden and prepared yummy snacks like baked apples and spinach smoothies, granola energy bites, and even made our own veggie stir fry, testing out 5 different sauces on our mix. I was even able to present a STEM lesson on the Sugar Content of various common name products. Kids measured out how may cups of sugar they thought was contained in each product, and then were amazed and astounded by the actual amounts of sugar in each prod...

  Streamflow and RUBBER DUCKIES?!?!?! I'm thrilled to be able to work with Oak Grove Elementary this year on their Problem Based Learning (PBL's) projects. In partnership with Dr. Barbara Shaw, CSU Extension Western Regional STEM Specialist, we are working with 5th grade students to determine the baseline water quality of Spring Creek, which runs behind their school playground. Water is one of the most important resources we have on this planet and our students are learning to both appreciate and protect that resource from pollution. Not our actual rubber duckies Today we visited the creek with our supplies of waders, nets, rulers, measuring tapes, and rubber duckies! QUACK!!! Our goal was to look at 5 different locations around the creek and determine the rate of flow of water by measuring width, average depth, and water speed (by means of racing rubber duckies!) to calculate the water's movement in Cubic Feet per Seconds (CFS). The different speeds, volumes, and movements...