This morning in New Orleans, as part of the Urban Science Education Leadership (USEL) session, presenters from the Baltimore City Public Schools described their district’s Elementary STEM Teacher Clinic and how it transformed the teachers who participated in it.
Emily Morgan and Karen Ansberry, authors of the popular Picture-Perfect Science Lessons Series, led a lively group of teachers in exploring classroom strategies and lessons that combine science with reading in the elementary grades. The Picture-Perfect Science Preconference Workshop at the New Orleans NSTA Area Conference included activities highlighting reading strategies like making connections, questioning, [...]
Find out how and why science educators around the country are integrating history in their science lessons to help students make connections to their world.
Zebrafish serve as the catalyst for integrating science across disciplines in this story from NSTA Reports.
This is the latest issue in a well-designed and informative series on inquiry learning. I would encourage secondary teachers to read these issues of Science and Children, especially if you’re new to the idea of inquiry learning or want to see what younger students are capable of. Many of the ideas can be adapted for [...]
Here’s a question for you, to help me understand the way science activities and science inquiry are developed in early childhood classrooms. It relates to the topic of the March 2011 issue of Science and Children, “Shifting from “Cookbook Labs” to Full Inquiry.” What questions do your preK-grade 2 students ask, investigate, document, and present their findings, [...]
Teachers often use words interchangeably when referring to science activities: labs, investigations, experiments, projects, inquiry. In this year’s Science and Children, the focus is on inquiry in the elementary classroom. As noted in the guest editorial Pathways to Inquiry, inquiry is not an analog, either/or process. Doing inquiry in the classroom requires laying a foundation [...]
Does your (or your child’s) early childhood program include science inquiry experiences? Here are a few resources to get started, or to expand on, your understanding of science inquiry. These resources are on my list because I have read them (some—not all, yet), or other works by the authors, or read the reviews on NSTA Recommends [...]
One of the many blogs I subscribe to is Not Exactly Rocket Science from Discover magazine. It’s good reading about science (Bad Astronomy is also published here). A recent entry Eight-year-old children publish bee study in Royal Society journal describes how a class of students in Devon, England, designed and conducted a study of what [...]
In the classroom, we are often so focused on answers that we forget to ask the right questions. The teacher is often the one asking questions, but in this issue the theme is on helping students to ask questions that can be the basis for inquiry-based investigations. In many workshops that I’ve done, I’ve given [...]
