K - 5 STEM Journal Bundle | Full-Year Engineering Activities

K–5 STEM Journal Bundle | Full-Year Engineering Design Journals | 216 Challenges, 1,588 Pages

Six full-year student STEM journals — 36 hands-on engineering challenges per grade, one for every week of the school year — with the recording pages, data tables, reflection prompts, and portfolios already built in. Print, staple, and your students have a year of documented engineering.

These are the student-facing journals for the K–5 STEM program: the place where kids plan, sketch, predict, record trials, graph results, and explain what their evidence shows. The engineering process grows with the student — from four picture-supported steps in Kindergarten to a ten-step optimize-and-communicate cycle in 5th Grade — so a school running all six gets one coherent progression instead of six unrelated notebooks.

What’s Included

Six complete grade-level journals (1,588 pages total):

Kindergarten STEM Journal (152 pages) — 36 challenges, 3 pages each. Ask → Imagine → Build → Share. Drawing, tracing, circling, and counting prompts; minimal writing. Ends with an Invention Convention.
1st Grade STEM Journal (211 pages) — 36 challenges, 5 pages each. Adds Investigate and a two-test format (build, test, improve one thing, test again). Exit tickets, self-assessments, year-end portfolio.
2nd Grade STEM Journal (251 pages) — 36 challenges, 6 pages each. Adds three design ideas before choosing one, repeated trials, blank graph grids, and evidence-with-numbers prompts. 36 exit tickets, 6 unit self-assessments.
3rd Grade STEM Investigator’s Journal (253 pages) — 36 investigations, 6 pages each. Adds testable questions, independent/dependent/controlled variables, typical values, and claim–evidence–reasoning–limitations. Teacher notes and pacing guide included.
4th Grade STEM Designer’s Journal (324 pages) — 36 projects, 8 pages each. Adds client briefs, budgets with running totals, weighted decision matrices, measurable criteria, and cost-per-performance analysis.
5th Grade STEM Innovator’s Journal (397 pages) — 36 projects, 10 pages each. Adds stakeholder analysis, test protocols, trade-off curves, optimization (“what did your design make worse, and why was that worth it?”), one-page technical summaries, flowchart and pseudocode practice, innovator badges, and a capstone showcase.
Across the bundle: 216 weekly challenges and roughly 1,370 student journal pages, plus exit tickets, self-assessments, and year-end portfolio pages at every grade from 1st up.

The Challenges

The same six-unit arc runs through every grade — Engineering Design, Materials/Matter, Forces & Motion or Energy, Life Science, Earth & Weather/Space, and Engineering for Communities. A few examples:

K: Tower Power · A Chair for Teddy · Three Little Houses · Bridge for a Toy Car · Magnet Movers · Playground Designers
1st: Towers, bridges, boats, balloon-powered cars, weather instruments, erosion barriers, signal devices
2nd: Stronger bridge, water filter, marble run, parachute, pollinator garden, water-saving device
3rd: Solar oven, wind-powered vehicle, earthquake-resistant structure, model ecosystem, weather station
4th: Food packaging, renewable energy, communication networks, earthquake-resistant buildings, shelters, biomimicry
5th: Water purification, wind turbines, energy storage, Mars habitats, assistive technology, sustainable cities
How It Works in the Classroom

Each challenge runs on a five-session weekly rhythm (K uses a simpler single-session routine). Students carry one journal all year, so their thinking, sketches, data, and improvements stay together — a complete record of growth you can send home, use for conferences, or grade against a rubric.

Two printing options at every grade: print and bind the whole journal once, or print just that week’s 3–10 pages to cut copying costs and let you skip or reorder weeks freely.

How the Process Grows

K — Ask · Imagine · Build · Share (3 pages/week): count and compare results
1st — adds Investigate, Test, Improve (5 pages/week): change one thing, test again
2nd — adds Plan (6 pages/week): three ideas, trials, graphs, numbers as evidence
3rd — adds Create, Analyze (6 pages/week): variables, fair tests, claim–evidence–reasoning
4th — 8-step design cycle (8 pages/week): clients, budgets, decision matrices, measurable criteria
5th — 10-step innovation cycle (10 pages/week): trade-offs, optimization, technical summaries, pseudocode
What Students Practice, K–5

Observing, building, and sharing (K) → predicting, testing twice, and comparing (1st) → generating multiple ideas, running trials, graphing, and explaining with numbers (2nd) → controlling variables and writing claim–evidence–reasoning (3rd) → budgeting, scoring options, and writing measurable criteria (4th) → optimizing across trade-offs and communicating a recommendation someone could act on (5th). By Week 36 of 5th Grade, students independently define a problem, research it, run all ten steps, and report a result.

Format

6 PDF files, 1,588 pages total
Print-and-go; designed for whole-journal binding or week-by-week printing
Teaching duration: 1 full school year per grade
Materials for the challenges are everyday classroom supplies
Pairs With the K–5 STEM Curriculum

The journals contain the student pages. The teacher-facing lesson plans for every weekly challenge are in the grade-level STEM Full-Year Curricula, sold separately or together in the K–5 STEM Curriculum Bundle. Every journal is also usable on its own — the criteria, constraints, data structures, and prompts are printed on the student pages.

Want the student-facing challenge cards too? See the K–5 STEM Challenge Cards Bundle. Want everything for all six grades? The K–5 STEM Mega Bundle includes the journals, curricula, challenge cards, and every other grade-level STEM resource in the store.

Why Buy the Bundle

Six journals bought separately cost $84.00. This bundle is $58.80 — and gives a STEM specialist, a grade-level team, or a whole elementary building one documented engineering progression from the first tower in Kindergarten to the final technical summary in 5th Grade.

Ask. Imagine. Build. Test. Improve. Communicate — and write it all down.