Can it reflect light? Is it a plant? Is it made of cells? These questions are among more than 100 formative assessment probes developed by Page Keeley and her colleagues to help teachers elicit information about what students think about key science concepts. A capacity crowd at Keeley’s Seattle conference session turned out to learn [...]
I enjoyed watching auto races as a child, so I decided to check out Norm Barstow’s session, Elastic Power: Wind Up Your Engines and Explore (a.k.a. “NASCAR in New Orleans”).
Demonstrating the carbon cycle was never so much fun as it was in Kristen Dotti’s session, Drop the Lecture and Let the Students Pick Up the Learning in Environmental Science.
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.
Stephen Pruitt enlightened conference attendees about the standards and asked them to lead the way for implementation in their states.
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, [...]
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 [...]
Seventy or more science educators vied for 50 seats in one popular workshop at the NSTA Conference in Kansas City. It was called “Activities from Across the Earth System.” Adaptable for K-12 students, the experts handed out these practical lessons and urged groups to demonstrate “adaptation investigation” the first of five take-aways. Acting as birds [...]
On an appropriately blustery morning in Kansas City, the short course “Wind Energy for the Science Classroom,” led by Joe Rand of The KidWind Project in St. Paul, MN, supplied participants with background information and sample classroom lessons on the rapidly growing field of wind energy. Joe began with an overview of where the industry [...]
