Tag Archives: activity ideas

Soil erosion in miniature

By Peggy Ashbrook | Published: May 13, 2013

With the heavy spring rains in my neighborhood there has been some erosion of soil on a slope in the park and soil from the baseball field has been washed across the sidewalk. There are not many fiction or non-fiction books for young children that include a discussion about soil erosion, or erosion in general. [...]

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Flatten the Classroom with the iGo Microscope

By Martin Horejsi | Published: May 3, 2013

Although many handheld technologies of Star Trek seem antiquated, or perhaps even steam punkish in todays world, there are still a few pieces of Treknata that we dream of. But that list just got one item shorter with the iGo wireless microscope. While not quite a Medical Tricorder, the iGo does capture the essence of [...]

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Biodiversity

By Mary Bigelow | Published: April 26, 2013

Toward the end of the school year, you might be looking for a culminating activity in which students can apply what they’ve learned during the year to new situations or problems. This issue has ideas that help students investigate the big idea of the interrelationships between biodiversity and human activity–how each affects the other. Exploring [...]

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Open-Ended Everyday Science Mysteries

By Carole Hayward | Published: April 26, 2013

This is exciting news! I’ve been a fan of the Everyday Science Mysteries for a long time, but it took time to cull through each volume to get the discipline-specific activities I wanted. In response to teacher demand, NSTA recently published the books for separate content areas: Physical Science, Life Science, and Earth and Space [...]

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What science happens in your sandbox?

By Peggy Ashbrook | Published: April 19, 2013

A pile of sand, a sandbox or a sensory table full of sand are tools for imaginative play, sensory exploration and science investigations.  In the April 2013 issue of Science and Children, the Early Years column, I wrote about how children wondered what made a series of cone-shaped pits in a line in the sandbox. [...]

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The history of our planet

By Mary Bigelow | Published: April 18, 2013

One of the themes in several articles and blogs I’ve read makes the case that the study of earth science should not stop at the end of middle school! Illustrating this, the final version of the Next Generation Science Standards were released last week, and the NSTA journals continue a discussion with The NGSS and [...]

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Science for all

By Mary Bigelow | Published: April 7, 2013

Sometimes it seems that some students are excluded from an expectation of success in the sciences – those with cognitive or physical disabilities, those who do not speak English, or those who do not appear to have the intellectual or reading levels that were thought to be important. I often wonder at the thinking and [...]

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It’s a puzzlement

By Mary Bigelow | Published: April 2, 2013

How many of us in the K-12 science environment use word puzzles to help students review concepts and learn vocabulary? I haven’t been convinced of the value of find-a-words or jumble puzzles are effective learning tools, but crossword puzzles and others that ask students to think of words to fit the clues could be useful. [...]

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Uncovering Student Ideas in Astronomy

By Carole Hayward | Published: March 26, 2013

I’m already a fan of the Uncovering Student Ideas series, but authors Page Keeley and Cary Sneider piqued my interest with the 45 new formative assessment probes in this latest volume, Uncovering Student Ideas in Astronomy. Trying to get a sense of how and what students think about a particular science concept is tricky. As [...]

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It’s Electric!

By Mary Bigelow | Published: March 24, 2013

When I was little, I had an “electric” map of the U.S. There were two wired probes, and the object of the game was to use them to connect the name of the state capital from a list in the margin with a state on the map. (This was long before computer games!) If the [...]

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