NET Scheme News 2024 Spring issue 45

The events of the past few years have created various learning and teaching challenges for all of us. To accommodate the needs of our current post-pandemic students in KS1,it was apparent that we had to enhance the NET Section Primary Literacy Programme for Reading (PLP-R). Through the initiative of our principal, Mr Chan Yu Kwan, STEAM has been integrated into children’s literature learning. One of the most effective strategies to engage students is to integrate STEAM education into literacy lessons (e.g. storytelling, reading aloud, shared reading). This infuses a different energy into traditional literacy lessons and can help broaden the appeal of learning and communicating in a foreign language. Students who are usually anxious about speaking in class or who have literacy challenges are more likely to participate in, and engage with the task. Children’s literature includes many topics and vocabulary items that can be related to STEAM education. These topics can provide opportunities for hands-on STEAM activities and experiments. For example, we created a P3 unit with a link to STEAM education based on the traditional fairy tale, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. In our version of the story, Little Red Riding Hood walks through the forest with a basket of cookies to visit her sick grandma. We examined the text and concluded that there were two teachable STEAM education topics presented in the story. The first one was food, health and nutrition and the second one was related to science and engineering. Integrating STEAM into Children’s Literature 14 NET Scheme News Issue 45 Primary Literacy Programme