OSF Children’s Hospital of Illinois is celebrating National STEAM Day by showing off the ways it keep kids learning during hospital visits.
STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art and math. To celebrate the day, 9-year-old Ellie Schwab spent Wednesday afternoon learning about the human heart from her hospital bed.
Sister M. Pieta, an innovation engineer at OSF, helped Ellie mix two different chemicals and a drop of purple dye into a plastic mold.
“Purple is my favorite color,” Ellie said, after choosing which dye to use to make her model.
When combined, the liquid plastics create an exothermic reaction. The fluid heats, bubbles, expands, hardens and changes color, all in the span of a few minutes. When it’s finished, Pieta and Ellie delicately removed a finished model of the human heart from the mold.
Pieta tells Ellie about valves and blood pools, how the heart moves blood throughout the body. After some conversation and consideration, Ellie pointed out a defect in the heart. It has four valves instead of the usual three.
There’s a wide range of activities the hospital uses to make learning engaging for kids. Pieta said some of them even utilize augmented reality programs through specially-made books.
Ellie has spina bifida, a condition where the backbone that protects the spinal cord doesn’t fully form at birth. She’s been in and out of the hospital her entire life. Currently, she’s recovering from her eighth surgery.
“So now there’s, like, a sponge thing in my back,” Ellie said. “And then there’s a huge tube that leads to that machine over there and the machine is hooked to my back.”
Over the last month, Ellie has spent 20 days in the hospital.
“She has been teaching us things since before she was even born about spina bifida and the medical field,” says Staci Schwab, Ellie’s mother. “And she's very inspiring to us. She inspires us.”
Ellie describes some of the other activities she’s been doing at the hospital. She’s made turkey feathers, seen painted pumpkins and helped create a boat to affix to her wheelchair for a Halloween costume. She says her true passion is art.
“I just go down the hallway. And I do arts and crafts,” Ellie said. “And I can stay there for, like, as long as I want to.”
Ellie said it’s “not the best” to be in the hospital. She misses her three sisters and two dogs. She misses her school and the classmates’ whose letters adorn the wall above her bed.
But she’s thankful for the support of her family and care team, and said the activities help make it easier to get through her hospital stays.
“I always tell the kids we want to keep their brain moving while they're here, just because there aren't as many tasks that they have to do here that they're expected to do at school,” said Becky Dailey, the OSF Children’s Hospital teacher. “So we try to create routines with them and just check in with them daily, do some type of enrichment activity with them daily.”
Dailey manages the homework and learning plans of 20 to 30 kids on a daily basis. Subjects include everything they learn in school, from colors and numbers for the younger kids to math and history for the teens.
She works with local schools to bring the homework assignments in and get them graded.
“I think they enjoy it,” Dailey said. “It gives them a little bit of something to look forward to, especially knowing I'm going into the room to do something fun with them.”
Pieta and Dailey say they also hope the activities help inspire some kids to eventually pursue a career in medicine. However, when asked about her future aspirations, it appears Ellie might have different plans.
“I always dreamed of working at Chuck ‘E Cheese,” she said. “Because my grandma works there and I always wanted to do what she does.”
Schwab said, if everything goes well, Ellie could return home from the hospital within a week.
