St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School hosted a family STEAM event on Sunday to introduce parents to new classroom activities.
“Students are teaching their parents how to think outside the box,” said Angela Ingram, principal at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School.
Last year, the school implemented more STEAM activities in their classrooms to apply knowledge through creation, Ingram said.
STEAM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, arts and math, aims to help students understand what they’re being taught, Ingram said.
Sunday was the first family night where those parents received first-hand experience concerning their children’s schoolwork, Ingram said.
Through 10 unique challenges, students had the opportunity to work with their parents and siblings to tackle problems in a creative way, Ingram said.
“There’s no failure, even if it doesn’t work,” she said.
Students have been learning to try different strategies until they have a solution, Ingram said.
The challenges aimed to promote communication between parents and their children, even teaching parents that sometimes a child’s solution can be right, Ingram said.
During the evening, everyone had to stay positive, they were not allowed to give up and they had to use everyone’s ideas, she said.
Challenges included becoming a paleontologist by digging chocolate chips out of a cookie without letting it crumble, or building a structure out of newspaper and masking tape, Ingram said.
Kids had an opportunity to show off their ideas, which were sometimes better than their parents’ ideas, Ingram said.
“This is our future,” she said.
The program is part of the school’s philosophy that there is “more to learning than textbooks and testing,” Ingram said.
She hopes these exercises will help prepare students for high school, college and beyond.
In the future, Ingram said the school plans to coordinate with Stennis Space Center and other programs on a global level.