LUMBERTON — On Saturday, the School of Education of UNCP opened its doors to welcome local families with previously acquired construction, electricity, and agricultural skills, all of these gained back in their home countries such as Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia among others.

Organizers said regularly, these parents are unaware of how their talents and skills can contribute to their multilingual children’s process of career readiness.

As a result, the ELD/ML Program of Public Schools of Robeson County has created an educational initiative called the Annual STEAM Day for PSRC Multilingual Families, a three hour session where ML parents and learners participate in Science experiments that mirror the complex and arduous jobs performed in our agricultural fields, food processing plants, and technology centers.

During the session, parents and students worked together to understand science vocabulary in English and Spanish, to identify practical applications in real life, and to discover and innovate with simple machines, robots, coding, building, mixing matter and chemical substances, disintegrating parts of a whole, using food coloring, assemble paper flying machines, making balloon race cars in addition to get to know how our Multilingual students are increasingly becoming more competitive in the robotics field.

This year’s event was supported by volunteers of all walks of life: district wide science teachers, PSRC robotics teams, district lego team, church members, high-school teachers, school administrators, ML teachers, school janitors, plus the staff of UNCP who worked hard to ensure this event’s success.

Hannah Pearson, who soon will graduate as an Elementary Education K-6 from UNCP volunteered to take the role of a journalist and she conducted the bilingual interviews with our district’s multilingual families.

To see the interview, scan the code in this article. The school district is looking forward to next year’s STEAM Day for ML Families that will be carried out in mid-April.