4th grade students at South Park Elementary use STEM to put on their own Thanksgiving parade
By ERICA MOKAY
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SOUTH PARK TOWNSHIP (KDKA) — People get so excited to watch and cheer during parades filled with marching bands and larger-than-life balloons, and at South Park Elementary, the 4th grade class is putting on a parade of their own.
Strike up the band and bring up the banner for the annual South Park Thanksgiving Day Parade!
From inflated characters like Garfield and Frosty, it’s a play on the real Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, it’s a lesson in STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math.
“Basically, our kids are engineers,” said South Park Elementary 4th grade teacher Lauren Finke.”
Before the big show on Thanksgiving Eve, the 4th graders work together in groups to design, construct, and sometimes reconstruct their balloons.
“We had an idea, but then it didn’t work,” said 4th grader Rainey Dankert.
But those flops, or worse, pops, their teachers say are part of the experience, giving these young float foremen practice with patience and problem solving.
“Our face and our body, they both popped,” said 4th grader Aiden Sanders. “But we stayed strong and did it again.”
“We need that in the world,” Finke said. “We need problem solvers. We need thinkers. We need people to discover and explore on their own and that’s what they’re doing.”
And they’re doing it to the beat of a drum.
“We did that!” Dankert exclaimed. “We accomplished basically a parade at our school.”
“I feel like I kinda want to be an engineer because it’s nice to process different steps of something new, and I think that’s cool to experience,” Sanders said.
Their once-paper plans now jumping off of the page and onto a parade route lined with their peers and with their faces full of pride and their futures full of possibilities.
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