In planning for the school year, I check for safety considerations on the National Science Teachers Association website, at www.nsta.org/portals/safety.aspx#elem
Of course, each class of children is different, and I won’t know until September if any of the four-year-olds still put small objects in their mouths, or if any of the children have allergies. Read More
Highlights of stimulating conversations taking place right now on our listservs:
In NSTA’s online professional learning communities, we welcome our 20 new users this past week, and forum posts involving rates of reaction are being discussed.
On our “core site” (www.nsta.org): our web news digest is active with stories on teachers getting training on oil spills, and cotton candy, and roller coasters.
On Facebook, NASA and classwish.org are posting links to various programs for science educators.
On LinkedIn, more direct posts from NSTA’s Career Center, and discussions about springtime ferns and next generation education.
And of course, on our Twitter stream, science educators are tweeting and re-tweeting about several freebies that NSTA offers, the upcoming national San Francisco conference, and more!
Now is the time to insure that you don’t miss a single journal issue or one minute of the time you use to network and build professional connections here in these online communities. Click the link above to renew your membership and insure that NSTA stays in your corner for your science education career!
This past year I didn’t communicate well enough with some of the classroom teachers I work with so some science activities that might have been used sat on the shelf instead. Putting my efforts into doing science with the classes of children has introduced their teachers to many activities but has not developed the teachers’ knowledge of science inquiry as fully as I had hoped. So next year I plan to…..(“calm” is relative—at least the summer pace of re-thinking my science work, planning family gatherings and summer school attendance is less hectic than the weekly gathering of materials for upcoming activities and parent meetings that occur during the school year.)
Now I have more time for reflection on where I want to make improvements to the science instruction at the preschool programs I’m involved with. One school has already sent out an email requesting ideas for strengthening the curriculum for the upcoming school year. I would like to do a training in science inquiry with the classroom teachers so they can experience the process themselves away from children. Taking a professional development course about science inquiry in early childhood myself at the University of Northern Iowa is one way I’m going to develop my skills. My summer reading list has a few teaching-related items on it, including the short piece How to…Ask the Right Questions by Patricia E. Blosser, a guide to evaluating your use of questions in the classroom and how the amount of time you wait for students to answer, and how long you wait to reply, affect the students’ learning. 
And I’m going to look for ways to collaborate close to home so I can learn all year long—your comments on the NSTA blogs and the discussions on the NSTA email lists always inform, and planning time with the other teachers in the school helps me reflect on what and how I teach. See the Summer 2010 issue of Science and Children for more ideas about how to make professional development work for you.
Peggy
In the interest of making it easier for early childhood educators to teach science, I am unabashedly tooting my own horn—read the Early Years column I write in the National Science Teachers Association’s elementary school journal, Science and Children. Not an NSTA member? Some of the Early Years columns are available online to non-members at no cost in the NSTA Learning Center if one follows these steps:
I think it will be worth your while to find columns about such topics as melting, inventing animals, and the sun’s energy. While you’re there take a look at some of the other benefits of membership. Members get one journal in the mail and online access to all 
four NSTA journals.
Is there a topic you would like me to write about in the Early Years column? Post a comment below and let me know.
Peggy
Congratulations to our new colleagues! Whether you’re a new college grad or changing to a new role as teacher, NSTA’s SciLinks can be a valuable resource for you. Through SciLinks, teachers and students can access vetted web pages that provide real-time information and new content on a host of science topics. The websites were selected and reviewed by a team of educators (aka “webwatchers”) before being added to the database. Some are tagged as teacher resources if they address professional issues, instructional strategies, or lesson plan suggestions.
There are two ways to find websites in SciLinks:
Once you find the websites related to your topic you can use them in several ways:
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Highlights of stimulating conversations taking place right now on our listservs:
In NSTA’s online professional learning communities, welcome to our 82 new users this past month!
On our “core site” (www.nsta.org): read about our Urban Science Education Leadership Academy—and then register to attend!
On Facebook, educators are discussing registering for NSTA’s fall conferences, the first of which is in Kansas City.
On LinkedIn, more direct posts from NSTA’s Career Center, and discussions about springtime ferns and next generation education.
And of course, on our Twitter stream, science educators are tweeting and re-tweeting about several freebies that NSTA offers, the upcoming national San Francisco conference, and more!
Now is the time to insure that you don’t miss a single journal issue or one minute of the time you use to network and build professional connections here in these online communities. Click the link above to renew your membership and insure that NSTA stays in your corner for your science education career!
I teach fourth and fifth graders in our school’s “Discovery Lab.” With over 700 students I am constantly brainstorming procedures to help the lab run smoother. One thing that I want to try is to assign student roles for group work. Do you have suggestions for these roles or any other information that might be helpful?
—Melody, Grenada, Mississippi
Defining roles is a key component of cooperative learning where students share the responsibility for learning. The literature on cooperative learning describes a variety of roles: ones commonly used in science classes include group leader, data recorder, measurer, equipment manager, liaison/questioner, artist/illustrator, researcher, timekeeper, and notetaker.
However, most of these traditional roles focus on logistics and procedures. I recommend the article “Teaching Students to Think Like Scientists During Cooperative Investigations” in the April/May 2008 edition of Science Scope. The authors (Voreis, et al.) describe how they use cognitive, or thinking, roles to help students develop inquiry skills and focus their activities on higher-order discussions and questions. The article has detailed descriptions of their roles (evidence collector, prediction manager, skeptic, and researcher), guidelines for the type of questions and responsibilities for each role, and an example of an evaluation sheet.
Regardless of what roles you decide to use, have job descriptions for each. These could checklists, a bulletin board display, index cards, or a page in the students’ science notebooks. The job descriptions could include mini-rubrics and conversation starters.
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Have you ever taken your students to STEM education events at an amusement park? We’re working on a story about theme parks where students can learn while having fun, such as Ohio’s Kings Island, which holds Math and Science Days every spring. We invite you to share your experiences at these parks by leaving a comment here. We might include some comments in the story, which will be published in July.
In SciLinks, as the webwatchers review new sites, each site is correlated to a specific keyword (such as Food Chains, Phases of the Moon, or Magnetic Fields). But sometimes, we run into collections of activities that include a broad spectrum of science-related topics. Although many of the individual activities are aligned with specific SciLinks keywords and are included in the database, the entire collection may be of interest.
These are not simply a list of someone’s favorite sites or activities. These are activities, simulations, and resources created by organizations or institutions as part of an outreach program or related to their projects and research. You can search the sites by grade level and subject area. Here are some examples of these collections:
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Is “connecting with nature” the same as “science”?
I think science walks and explorations, and making art would be excellent ways to connect children with nature. Perhaps taking nature walks would be a good first step in strengthening the science curriculum in early childhood programs.
The “Into the Woods” Teaching through Trade Books column by Karen Ansberry and Emily Morgan (Science and Children April/May 2007) describes how a class can explore a natural area outdoors, record their observations, and create a class book containing their own questions and answers about local wildlife (available at no cost online to NSTA members and to non-members after registration—scroll down to search). “A Walk in the ‘Tall, Tall Grass’” by Kathryn Kaatz (Science and Children February 2008) describes an inquiry-based lesson (inspired by Denise Fleming’s 1991 book entitled, In the Tall, Tall Grass) that takes kindergarteners out on a nature walk to make observations and record them (available at no cost online to NSTA members and for $0.99 to non-members—scroll down to search).
Peggy