Your Science Classroom


Book Description

Your Science Classroom: Becoming an Elementary / Middle School Science Teacher, by authors M. Jenice "Dee" Goldston and Laura Downey, is a core teaching methods textbook for use in elementary and middle school science methods courses. Designed around a practical, "practice-what-you-teach" approach to methods instruction, the text is based on current constructivist philosophy, organized around 5E inquiry, and guided by the National Science Education Teaching Standards.




Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School


Book Description

Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School offers in-depth information about the fundamental features of project-based science and strategies for implementing the approach. In project-based science classrooms students investigate, use technology, develop artifacts, collaborate, and make products to show what they have learned. Paralleling what scientists do, project-based science represents the essence of inquiry and the nature of science. Because project-based science is a method aligned with what is known about how to help all children learn science, it not only helps students learn science more thoroughly and deeply, it also helps them experience the joy of doing science. Project-based science embodies the principles in A Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards. Blending principles of learning and motivation with practical teaching ideas, this text shows how project-based learning is related to ideas in the Framework and provides concrete strategies for meeting its goals. Features include long-term, interdisciplinary, student-centered lessons; scenarios; learning activities, and "Connecting to Framework for K–12 Science Education" textboxes. More concise than previous editions, the Fourth Edition offers a wealth of supplementary material on a new Companion Website, including many videos showing a teacher and class in a project environment.







A Guide to Teaching Elementary Science


Book Description

Nationally and internationally, educators now understand the critical importance of STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Today, the job of the classroom science teacher demands finding effective ways to meet current curricula standards and prepare students for a future in which a working knowledge of science and technology will dominate. But standards and goals don’t mean a thing unless we: • grab students’ attention; • capture and deepen children’s natural curiosity; • create an exciting learning environment that engages the learner; and • make science come alive inside and outside the classroom setting. A Guide to Teaching Elementary Science: Ten Easy Steps gives teachers, at all stages of classroom experience, exactly what the title implies. Written by lifelong educator Yvette Greenspan, this book is designed for busy classroom teachers who face tough conditions, from overcrowded classrooms to shrinking budgets, and too often end up anxious and overwhelmed by the challenges ahead and their desire for an excellent science program. This book: • helps teachers develop curricula compatible with the Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core Standards; • provides easy-to-implement steps for setting up a science classroom, plus strategies for using all available resources to assemble needed teaching materials; • offers detailed sample lesson plans in each STEM subject, adaptable to age and ability and designed to embrace the needs of all learners; and • presents bonus information about organizing field trips and managing science fairs. Without question, effective science curricula can help students develop critical thinking skills and a lifelong passion for science. Yvette Greenspan received her doctorate degree in science education and has developed science curriculum at all levels. A career spent in teaching elementary students in an urban community, she now instructs college students, sharing her love for the teaching and learning of science. She considers it essential to encourage today’s students to be active learners and to concentrate on STEM topics that will help prepare them for the real world.




Perspectives


Book Description

Here's a time-saving way to learn what research tells you about teaching elementary science and applying the findings both inside and outside your classroom. It's a collection of 27 "Perspectives" columns from Science and Children, NSTA's award-winning elementary-level journal. The book is organised in six science-specific sections, including general teaching goals, strategies to facilitate learning, student thinking and misconceptions, and your own professional development. The columns are written to make it easy to grasp the material and then use what research tells you about issues of specific interest to K-6 science instruction. Each column starts with a classroom vignette highlighting a particular challenge--from using analogies to blending science and reading instruction to effective ways to ask questions; provides a synthesis of key research findings, organised as a series of questions; and concludes with specific advice you can use right away. This useful compendium is ideal for K-6 teachers as well as science supervisors and preservice elementary science methods professors who want more students to benefit from what research tells us.




How Students Learn


Book Description

How do you get a fourth-grader excited about history? How do you even begin to persuade high school students that mathematical functions are relevant to their everyday lives? In this volume, practical questions that confront every classroom teacher are addressed using the latest exciting research on cognition, teaching, and learning. How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom builds on the discoveries detailed in the bestselling How People Learn. Now, these findings are presented in a way that teachers can use immediately, to revitalize their work in the classroom for even greater effectiveness. Organized for utility, the book explores how the principles of learning can be applied in teaching history, science, and math topics at three levels: elementary, middle, and high school. Leading educators explain in detail how they developed successful curricula and teaching approaches, presenting strategies that serve as models for curriculum development and classroom instruction. Their recounting of personal teaching experiences lends strength and warmth to this volume. The book explores the importance of balancing students' knowledge of historical fact against their understanding of concepts, such as change and cause, and their skills in assessing historical accounts. It discusses how to build straightforward science experiments into true understanding of scientific principles. And it shows how to overcome the difficulties in teaching math to generate real insight and reasoning in math students. It also features illustrated suggestions for classroom activities. How Students Learn offers a highly useful blend of principle and practice. It will be important not only to teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, and teacher educators, but also to parents and the larger community concerned about children's education.




Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School Classrooms


Book Description

This text provides an overview of current science teaching practices for the elementary and middle grades. The authors, top scholars in the field of science education, believe that all children should develop an in-depth and meaningful understanding of scientific concepts and processes. To achieve this, the text utilizes the Project Based Approach. Project-based science stresses that science teaching should emphasize the active engagement of students in science, rather than teachers telling students information. Each chapter has several Portfolio Activity boxes that provide active learning experiences or reflections for the student. Like the first edition, the text includes numerous strategies in each chapter that help both new and experienced teachers understand how to teach science in an active and engaging manner. The text also shows teachers how to implement the National Science Education Standards (NSES) and constructivist strategies. A NSES marginal feature keys content to the standards. Moreover, this textbook helps teachers learn how to implement all of today's major reforms; not just read about them.




The Science Teacher's Toolbox


Book Description

A winning educational formula of engaging lessons and powerful strategies for science teachers in numerous classroom settings The Teacher’s Toolbox series is an innovative, research-based resource providing teachers with instructional strategies for students of all levels and abilities. Each book in the collection focuses on a specific content area. Clear, concise guidance enables teachers to quickly integrate low-prep, high-value lessons and strategies in their middle school and high school classrooms. Every strategy follows a practical, how-to format established by the series editors. The Science Teacher's Toolbox is a classroom-tested resource offering hundreds of accessible, student-friendly lessons and strategies that can be implemented in a variety of educational settings. Concise chapters fully explain the research basis, necessary technology, Next Generation Science Standards correlation, and implementation of each lesson and strategy. Favoring a hands-on approach, this bookprovides step-by-step instructions that help teachers to apply their new skills and knowledge in their classrooms immediately. Lessons cover topics such as setting up labs, conducting experiments, using graphs, analyzing data, writing lab reports, incorporating technology, assessing student learning, teaching all-ability students, and much more. This book enables science teachers to: Understand how each strategy works in the classroom and avoid common mistakes Promote culturally responsive classrooms Activate and enhance prior knowledge Bring fresh and engaging activities into the classroom and the science lab Written by respected authors and educators, The Science Teacher's Toolbox: Hundreds of Practical Ideas to Support Your Students is an invaluable aid for upper elementary, middle school, and high school science educators as well those in teacher education programs and staff development professionals.




Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School


Book Description

A practical methods text that prepares teachers to engage their students in rich science learning experiences Featuring an increased emphasis on the way today′s changing science and technology is shaping our culture, this Second Edition of Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School provides pre- and in-service teachers with an introduction to basic science concepts and methods of science instruction, as well as practical strategies for the classroom. Throughout the book, the authors help readers learn to think like scientists and better understand the role of science in our day-to-day lives and in the history of Western culture. Part II features 100 key experiments that demonstrate the connection between content knowledge and effective inquiry-based pedagogy. The Second Edition is updated throughout and includes new coverage of applying multiple intelligences to the teaching and learning of science, creating safe spaces for scientific experimentation, using today′s rapidly changing online technologies, and more. Valuable Instructor and Student resources: The password-protected Instructor Teaching Site includes video clips that illustrate selected experiments, PowerPoint® lecture slides, Electronic Test Bank, Teaching guides, and Web resources. The open-access Student Study Site includes tools to help students prepare for exams and succeed in the course: video clips that illustrate selected experiments, chapter summaries, flash cards, quizzes, helpful student guides links to state standards, licensure exams and PRAXIS resources, and Learning from SAGE Journal Articles.




Taking Science to School


Book Description

What is science for a child? How do children learn about science and how to do science? Drawing on a vast array of work from neuroscience to classroom observation, Taking Science to School provides a comprehensive picture of what we know about teaching and learning science from kindergarten through eighth grade. By looking at a broad range of questions, this book provides a basic foundation for guiding science teaching and supporting students in their learning. Taking Science to School answers such questions as: When do children begin to learn about science? Are there critical stages in a child's development of such scientific concepts as mass or animate objects? What role does nonschool learning play in children's knowledge of science? How can science education capitalize on children's natural curiosity? What are the best tasks for books, lectures, and hands-on learning? How can teachers be taught to teach science? The book also provides a detailed examination of how we know what we know about children's learning of scienceâ€"about the role of research and evidence. This book will be an essential resource for everyone involved in K-8 science educationâ€"teachers, principals, boards of education, teacher education providers and accreditors, education researchers, federal education agencies, and state and federal policy makers. It will also be a useful guide for parents and others interested in how children learn.