Are you an urban or rural educator seeking pearls of wisdom for engaging your students? Plan to attend the NSTA National Conference in Philadelphia. The conference will give you those “pearls” through a strand of sessions entitled Meeting the Unique Needs of Urban and Rural Learners.
Playing in water opens many avenues for science explorations—flow, wetness or phases of matter, volume, and buoyancy. Unexpected results make children think and explore further. For example, children know that fish are supposed to float, so playing with a toy fish that sinks will get children thinking about why. We can let children know that [...]
I always look forward to the NSTA journal issues that have a theme with the words integrated or interdisciplinary in them. Interdisciplinary is one of those words that is hard to define, but we “know it when we see it.” The article Thinking, Teaching, and Learning Science Outside the Boxes in the February 2009 issue [...]
July is a distant memory of 6am wake up calls for my high-schooler who took PE over the summer, balanced with my getting more than five minutes of peace and quiet—time to read about early childhood and science, to think my own thoughts and get hungry for conversation. Summer school is a wonderful thing and [...]
Do deciduous tree leaves in your area change color before they fall? On the occasion of the autumn equinox, here are a few books about trees and fall leaf colors that I have enjoyed reading to my students when we discussed the season’s change from summer to fall: Fresh Fall Leaves by Betsy Franco, Shari [...]
Just in case you have not yet read the column “Teaching Through Tradebooks” in Science and Children, the National Science Teachers Association’s elementary school journal, I’ll share why I like it with you. The column writes up two activities, one for K–3 and one for 4–6. The book choices are always excellent, the kind of books that you hold onto [...]
Math and Science in Preschool: Policies and Practice, a National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) Preschool Policy Brief, says that teachers usually do not plan and support science and math learning in pre-K. How does that happen when young children are so curious about the world and so interested in who has more, is [...]
Like learning to count or to read, learning how to do science is a process. Children of all ages benefit from exposure to “science” situations where they are encouraged to fully experience our world, describe what they see, count and record data, ask questions about the experience, repeat the experience, and think and talk about [...]
Colored acetate sheets make new colors as they overlap. Give children just the primary colors–a dark pink, a blue, and a yellow—and they can create orange, green, purple, and deep grays and browns without any instruction. Like scientists they can share their results with others and repeat the process to see if the results are [...]
Observing the life cycle of an insect can include measuring growth and weight, counting calendar days and reading fiction, non-fiction, and writing poetry and descriptions—all ways to integrate science with other subjects in elementary school. Many skills and much information, such as, learning about the continents and names of land forms, how to read or [...]
