Start off the school year with ideas and resources from your NSTA colleagues.

Science and Children – Sharing Products: Science Exhibitions and Beyond

The featured articles this month describe how teachers and students can go beyond traditional replicas and science fairs to create products and processes that showcase their learning and problem-solving skills (and their creativity)

• Need to know more about the “maker movement?” Bringing the Maker Movement to School describes student “tinkering” and problem solving, culminating in a showcase of ideas and projects.
• Remaking Science Fairs has alternatives to the traditional, competitive science fairs, including a timeline for a class science “convention.”  
• Celebrating Science With the Community describes how to modify a formulaic science fair into a celebration of learning with an authentic, public audience. Examples include a career fair, a science convention, and a pop-up restaurant in which students showcased their knowledge of plants.
• The lesson described in Firefly, Firefly includes trade books and the arts to capitalize on students’ interest in these insects
• The Early Years: Classroom Memories illustrates students creating a “documentation panel” to communicate, share, and reflecy on what they are learning. The article includes a lesson on water flow as an example.
• Teaching Through Trade Books: What We Do With Ideas has two 5E lessons that focus on helping students expand their thinking through fostering creativity and divergent thinking. Methods and Strategies: Science Storybooks also describes using trade books in science.
• The Poetry of Science: Sinking and Floating has a poetic way to introduce the concepts.
• Seeing Science in Haiku exemplifies how students can communicate their observations creatively. The article includes examples and teaching suggestions.
• Science 101: What Constitutes a Good Science Project goes beyond a lock-step scientific “method” to describe the reality of science investigations.
• Engineering Encounters: Designing Healthy Ice Pops combines two things students like: science and food (but don’t eat in the lab!).

For more on the content that provides a context for these projects and strategies see the SciLinks topics Arachnida, Bioluminescence, Buoyancy, Current Electricity, Electric Current, How does nature reuse materials?, Insects, Nutrition, Parts of a Plant, Plants as Food, Watersheds.

Science Scope – Asking Questions, Planning Investigations

Articles that describe lessons include a helpful sidebar documenting the big idea, essential pre-knowledge, time, and cost.

• Investigating Axial Seamount: Using Student-Generated Models to Understand Plate Tectonics has suggestions for helping students develop and use models to explain how and why volcanoes appear where they do.
• A Middle School Lake Study: Connecting Disciplines Through a Hands-On Experience incorporates math, science, the arts, and humanities into a cress-disciplinary experience.
• A Closer Look at Flowers: Exploring Structure and Function in Science and Art uses an artistic approach to studying plant reproduction
• Instead of teaching isolated skills, check out Teacher to Teacher: Start the School Year With an Authentic Activity for a 5E lesson using “double stuff” cookies (but no eating in the lab!)
• Disequilibrium: Teaching Discrepant Events With the 5E Instructional Model is the first installment of a new series that deals with misconceptions students have.
• Rather than reading a list of rules on the first day of school, try the activities described in Science for All: Creating Student Buy-In on Day One.
• Classic Lessons 2.0: The Power of Nanoscale combines current research with student explorations in measurement.
• Teacher’s Toolkit: A Bird in the Cage Is Worth Two in a Bush illustrates how to modify a lesson to incorporate the three components of NGSS.
• Citizen Science: Testing the Water: World Watering Challenge is another new feature of Science Scope, focusing on authentic nationwide projects.

For more on the content that provides a context for these projects and strategies see the SciLinks topics Chemical Reactions, Color, Deposition, Earthquakes, Eclipses, Lakes and Ponds, Plant Reproduction, Pollination, Plate Tectonics, Ring of Fire, Volcanoes, Volcanic Zones, Weathering/Erosion.

The Science Teacher – Systems and Models, Part 2

The featured articles in this issue continue a focus on systems and models, starting in the Summer issue.

• Achieving Liftoff describes how students can integrate questions and activities to develop a story that is an explanatory model of a phenomenon.
• Find Your Center includes a 5E lesson in which students explore the concept of the center of mass and apply this to biomechanics and human movements in sports.
• Scaling Up has a different spin on a traditional plant unit. Students progress through a study of the carbon cycle and plant growth.
• Separating a Mixture shows how students make and use models to explain interactions between ionic substances.
• Enzyme reactions are studied in A Twist on Measuring Catalase.
• Science 2.0: Transforming Science Education With New Tech Standards reflects on the many opportunities technology provides for students to collect and analyze data and to communicate their results.
• Focus on Physics: When Our Round Earth Was First Measured shows the connection between geometry and science.
• The Green Room: When Climate Change Causes Extinction has resources for current events.
• Health Wise: Should Your School Offer Grab-and-Go Breakfasts? (but not in the science classroom) has an interesting research question.

For more on the content that provides a context for these projects and strategies see the SciLinks topics Carbon Cycle, Center of Mass, Enzymes, Ethnobotany, Ionic Bonds, Measurement, Mixtures and Pure Substances, Nutrition, Plant Growth, Rocket Technology, Space Shuttle, Yeast Life Cycle.