How to encourage early STEM education at home is critical to the years from birth through primary school to encourage the growth of curiosity and creativity necessary to understand science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) concepts at a very early age. However parents must be intentional in developing those skills by creating a home environment that can plant STEM seeds into a child’s thinking and growth.

How to encourage early STEM education at home involves observing, asking questions, defining problems, looking for evidence, evaluating information, planning and investigating, measuring and using tools. All are practices that STEM fields use and should be encouraged at home tapping into the wonder of how STEM is all around us.

Hubby and I have been deliberate when we became new parents to invest in educational toys that encourage creating, building and learning about STEM concepts through play. We created educational stations in our home that involve make believe, arts and crafts, maker space, lego corner, puzzles because they are important in early childhood development and of course play where they are free to be kids indoors or outdoors.

How to encourage early STEM education at home starts from the time they are born to help children become critical thinkers. Summer at our home is when we start the beginning of a new home education year. I absolutely love workbooks that support inquiry-based learning and promote STEM literacy and Scholastic Jumbo Book of Kindergarten Fun for my four year old is the perfect home education resource that introduced her to the fun of word search.

I was ready to assist right away with the very first word search in the workbook because Babygirl is an emerging reader but she happily surprised me by not requiring any help and was determined to solve it on her own. I watched her develop strategies to find clues, discover new words, spelling and most importantly being proud of herself when she spied the full word as she calls it.

How to encourage early STEM education at home I realize offers a unique benefit when it came to word search in that in addition to keeping children engaged, it is a great source of exercise for the brain and improve a child’s language skills, concepts needed for STEM education. One of the best practices in teaching and learning STEM education at home is to make learning relevant and fun. There is nothing more relevant than possessing a rich vocabulary which can definitely boost and increase academic and social confidence and set children up for a successful future in STEM not just in the workplace, but also in the world as a whole.

Our family understands the importance of raising STEM girls and is excited to kick off the week with Computer Science Education Week by participating in the worldwide phenomenon that is the hour of code. Computer Science Education Week is held annually in recognition of the birthday of computing pioneer Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906) who invented one of the first compiler related tools. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.

The Hour of Code started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify “code”, to show that anybody can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. It has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities but expanding to all sorts of community efforts. Check out the tutorials and activities. The goal of the Hour of Code is not to teach anybody to become an expert computer scientist in one hour. One hour is only enough to learn that computer science is fun and creative, that it is accessible at all ages, for all students, regardless of background.

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