Parents play very important roles in their children’s education. From at-home activities to making decisions about where they send their kids to school, and how they spend their time together, they have impact on their children’s learning. A more important role of parents was highlighted since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Parents suddenly had to become teachers. Teachers who never received training to teach. That was especially true for parents with early elementary-aged and younger children. Parents used available resources to help their children learn different subjects. Resources on some subjects were more accessible and available than others. And teaching subjects like engineering that had very limited resources became the least of parents’ priority, if not eliminated completely. Thus, in an effort to help friends with young children, and to expand engineering education resources for parents, we planned a series of workshops for parents to help teach their kids engineering using everyday items.
In this resource exchange, we share the guideline we developed for parents so they can easily develop wide range of play-based engineering activities integrated in science, math and story-telling. We provide examples of the activities we and participating parents developed, as samples to be used by other parents and educators.
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