Enhancing Literacy Skills Through STEM Activities: A Case for STREAM

The current buzz around STEM and the increased push towards programs that feature mathematics and the sciences give those of us in the literacy world pause, as we see the research funding pendulum swinging away from us and towards this shiny and new curriculum paradigm. But, what is presented here is an olive branch between literacy and STEM instruction and a perhaps a new way to view cross-curricular pedagogy. STREAM (Science, Technology, Reading, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) is a robust, multimodal approach for improving science, mathematics and literacy skills by embedding dynamic and artistic literacy-building activities into Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) units (Breiner, Harkness, Johnson, & Koehler, 2012).