NORWICH – Holy Family School in Norwich recently introduced a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) initiative to the school’s youngest students, in an effort to provide the foundations of problem solving and critical thinking, skills widely recognized as being essential to a 21st century education.

Holy Family School principal Lydia Brenner explains, “We wanted to start laying the groundwork for STEM as early as possible, but wanted our efforts to engage the children in fun and age-appropriate ways. That’s why I was so excited to find out what Fisher-Price offers.”

With the help of special products by educational toy-maker Fisher-Price, Holy Family is able to offer children in Early Childhood (3-4 year olds), PreK, and Kindergarten foundational instruction that will not only help them in the short term, but also foster life-long skills like critical thinking, discovery, and memory.

In a typical session using one of the new learning toys called the Code-a-Pillar, Holy Family PreK students explore the basics of coding and sequencing: they attempt to tell the motorized Code-a-pillar how to get from a starting point to an ending point using a series of interconnected segments that each contain an instruction for the Code-a-pillar to follow. The toy encourages experimentation and reasoning as the students discover which patterns work and which don’t.