STEMterprise spotlight: Mrs. Dillon’s grade 3 class

Reading time: 3 minutes 

We have learned so much from teachers who tested Ontario Farming STEMterprise in their classrooms! In November’s newsletter we shared what we heard from Jody Michalofsky, who teaches grade three in Kitchener. This month, we are sharing feedback from Crystal Dillon from Orleans.

Spotlight: Crystal Dillon’s gr. 3 class (OCDSB)

“This is an excellent cross-curricular program that is highly engaging and a great way to cover multiple curriculum objectives in Science, Math, Language and even Social Studies”

Crystal started the STEMterprise program with her students in April as a way to revisit prior learning and as a year-end project. 

She had a large class of grade 3 students with a variety of needs, and the help of a wonderful student teacher!  Because her students had already covered some of the topics such as soils, Crystal modified the program to work for her class. 

Overall, Crystal found that student engagement was high, particularly with the selection of videos, especially the DinoRobot video, which Crystal’s students said “is like a Roomba for your farm!” (We wish we had thought of that comparison!)

Crystal told us, “STEMterprise would be great to start with it in mind at the beginning of the new year, because you can tie in multiple units.  For example, soils in the environment and the growth and changes in plants.   You can weave it in as a special activity once a month throughout the course of the school year.  You’re also able to package it up into something smaller and tighter if you need it to happen over a few months or even just a few weeks.” 

Tips for teachers:

• Download all of the resources at the start of the project so that you can rearrange and select the activities that are going to work for your students.
• You can modify the slides and deliver a reduced version of the lessons if you’ve already covered the topic.  All of the slides and worksheets are editable so it’s easy for a teacher to make it fit their class needs.
• Sign up for the farmer visit.  It’s a meaningful connection for students to make.
• It’s worth the effort to do the taste testing activity – her students really loved this lesson and activity.  Send a letter home to families to make them aware and precut the bars.
• If you are planting, prepare the pucks in advance to keep things on track and somewhat clean and organized.  Crystal had students working on a concurrent activity and then called them up two at a time to plant their seeds. 

Watch the video to see how Crystal’s class did the project here.

Thank you to Crystal for sharing her experience with us, which lead us to make some improvements to the project. 

We would love to hear your STEMterprise classroom stories! Please consider sharing what is going on in your classroom in this open form survey.  Send us your report card of our performance! And if you can, please send us pictures to include in future updates (email it to: web@gfo.ca).  

For your effort, we’ll draw one lucky name and email the $250 Amazon gift card on June 30, 2025.  Tell your colleagues!