When Lee Anne Carnell was first asked by her former principal if she wanted to teach STEAM, she didn’t hesitate.
“I said, ‘Absolutely!’ ” Carnell recalls with a laugh. “And as soon as she left, I was on Google, because I had no clue what it was!”
She knows it – and loves it – backward and forward now. Carnell has taught STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) for the past eight years, including six at Dan Mills Elementary School in Inglewood, where she works with students in every grade, kindergarten through fifth. 
Carnell sees STEAM as not just an exciting, hands-on teaching and learning approach but also a way to ensure that students know how to think for themselves.
“What we do in here is we exercise our brains, and we become problem solvers,” she says. “I'm just giving them opportunities to think and to reason and to figure things out. Sometimes they get a little frustrated, because it’s hard, but I want them to be able to start learning how to work through their own problems.”
A Lesson on Constellations
On a recent morning, Carnell talked with first graders about constellations of stars.
“Did you know the stars make pictures?” she asked the group after they sat on the floor and got ready to watch a short video on the subject.
“Yeah, some of them are famous!” one girl replied, prompting a discussion about the Big Dipper, Leo, and other well-known constellations and how people used to follow the stars to get where they needed to go.
After the students returned to their tables and chairs, Carnell led them in using paper, scissors, push pins, and empty toilet paper rolls to assemble pictures of constellations that they could see through the cardboard tubes. Several students, including a boy wearing a T-shirt that read “Scientists Never Give Up,” approached her later to show her their finished products.
“The kids get so excited about it,” she said. “The kids love science. I try to give them a little bit more of an experience with it.”
Spending Time with Children at School and at Home
Carnell has three grown children of her own, plus two grandchildren and another on the way, and spends most of her free time with them. One of her children, Candice Davenport, teaches at Westmeade Elementary.
Carnell, who grew up in Missouri, earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Arkansas State University and, years later, a master’s in instructional media with a STEM endorsement from Wilkes University. She’s taught in MNPS for 23 years now. She started out teaching fourth, fifth, and seventh grades, then switched to teaching computers for 11 years before moving to STEAM while at Lakeview Elementary in Antioch.
It’s a move she’ll always be glad she made.