STEAM DaVinci Renaissance Style: A Unit for Elementary GATE

In STEM Renaissance Style, students will follow the engineering process as they return to the 16th Century. With these lessons, the teacher defines the problem, helps students gather background research, and specifies the requirements. The students do the rest: creating alternative solutions, choosing the best solution, doing development work, building a prototype, and testing and redesigning.

Students construct a prototype of Da Vinci’s parachute while learning about falling objects, gravity, and drag. They design and build working cranes through background knowledge of simple machines and Newton’s Laws of Motion. As Renaissance artists, they try their hand at perspective drawings; and as architects and designers, they explore the magic of the Golden Mean.

STEM Renaissance Style has been tried and tested with 4th, 5th, and 6th grade gifted and talented students. The unit will meet the needs of an upper elementary gifted and talented pull-out group meeting once or more per week over the course of a semester. Teachers can count on a minimum of 12 hours of class time with these lessons—much more if suggested lesson extension opportunities are taken.

With these lessons, students will be urged to be thinkers, not repeaters; creators, not copiers; and artists instead of manufacturers. The lessons provide depth of knowledge for content standards and plenty of room to grow, specific references to standards validate the critical thinking, engineering tasks, and targeted nonverbal ability methods. It’s a unit designed for 21st Century Learners—our best and our brightest in a modern world built for the nonverbally gifted student.