National awareness and ongoing movements promoting literacy and STEM education in the early years and early grades create an opportunity for collaboration to improve educational outcomes for our nation’s children, especially those from low-income families. Too often, education systems with scarce resources feel compelled to focus their instruction on one or the other, setting up a competition between teaching literacy and STEM subjects. However, the research on cognition, pedagogy and brain function shows that students gain more knowledge and skills in literacy and STEM subjects when they are taught in tandem.