Fourth-grade students at Circleville Elementary School took part in the annual “Trick or Treat for STEAM”on Halloween, with activities that involved science, technology, engineering, art and math.

They rotated through the four classrooms and completed a different activity in each:

• Creepy Crawler Catchers where they designed and built a trap for a “bat” using a spider web – string, tape, popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.
• Bone Bridges where they designed and built a bridge to hold candy pumpkins using Q-tips, clothespins, popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.
• Pumpkin Patch Maze where they had to design and build a maze with obstacles using a paper plate, tissue paper, paper grass, pom poms and construction paper.
• M&M Statistics where they had to find the average number of M&Ms in a bag as well as the average of each color using an Excel spreadsheet.

Their results were sometimes surprising, oftentimes predictable, always creative and absolutely collaborative and fun. Hands-on is a great way to learn and remember.

In 2014, this event started as “Trick or Treat for Science,” then became “Trick or Treat for STEM,” and now reflects the incorporation of art.

The idea originally stemmed from longtime friends Andrea Urmston, now a fourth-grade teacher at CES, and Melissa Rancourt, founder of Greenlight for Girls (G4G). They were brainstorming ways to incorporate the mission of G4G into the classroom as well as ways to incorporate classroom realities into the organization.

For more information on the global organization Greenlight for Girls, visit their website or Facebook page.