Gentle readers, here are two opportunities for us to be part of a larger professional community. For just 24 hours, beginning 9:00 a.m. on Monday, NSTA membership for $50 The National Science Teachers Association publishes four journal, including Science and Children, the journal for early childhood through grade 6. The December issue has 5 articles written [...]
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.
For early childhood teachers professional development can range from first aid to interactive reading to integrating science inquiry with literacy and mathematics learning. We hope we never have to use the first aid training but everything else is a boost to our teaching. This summer I got to participate in a training on science inquiry held [...]
As I was packing up materials and readying the classrooms for summer storage I reflected back over the year and thought about the next. Developing an on-going inquiry (or overlapping inquiries because more than one class uses the space at this school) is foremost in my mind. I want to find some resources to share [...]
Imagine—you submit a proposal for a session at the NSTA conference, and you’re ecstatic when it’s accepted. And then you learn that you have an 8:00 AM Sunday morning time slot, in competition with early departures, church services, hotel brunches, and losing an hour to daylight savings time. Will anyone come to my session? Steve [...]
My principal recently invited me to serve on the school improvement committee; both my mentor and the high school science department chair have urged me to accept. I’m just in my second year of teaching, so I’m not sure I would have anything to offer. —Joseph, Columbia, South Carolina Participating in a school-wide committee could [...]
Which route did you take to the classroom: the traditional path, or an alternate route? Read “Different Routes to Science Teaching Lead to Common Ground,” the November issue’s cover story, and find out what your colleagues have to say about certification.
Thank you all for your great comments on my first blog post! This is a first for me and I wasn’t sure what the responses would be. There are some great examples of what is going on right now in classrooms. I am going to respond to some of the major points included in your [...]
The National Association for the Education of Young Children‘s annual conference has plenty of sessions about teaching science to young children, so many that I am going to have to make some tough decisions about which to attend. Fortunately, presenters can upload their handouts to the NAEYC website so I can look there to get [...]
The on-site Science Store at the Kansas City Area Conference has been bustling. Books and gear items garnering a lot of attention include John Haysom and Michael Bowen’s new NSTA Press book Predict, Observe, Explain: Activities Enhancing Scientific Understanding and Michael Klentschy’s Using Science Notebooks in Middle School. Susan Koba and Anne Tweed’s Hard-to-Teach Biology [...]
