JoinAll Book Chapters
Book Chapter
A Team-Teaching Game Plan for One School Year
This chapter helps to outline what all co-teaching teams should be doing during each phase of a typical school year. Because the two individuals involved in co-teaching are operating in a situation in which there must be teamwork, the authors recomme...
Book Chapter
Teaching Science to Students With Special Needs in Advance Classes
Most advanced science classes are not team taught. Although there may be several students with special needs in honors, gifted and talented, International Baccalaureate (IB), or Advanced Placement (AP) science classes, classroom instruction is typica...
Book Chapter
Science and Art: Dueling Disciplines or Dynamic Duo?
A mixer activity (supplemented by “scientific” art, music, and optional demonstrations) is used to catalyze a conversation on the similarities and differences between the sciences and the arts. ...
Book Chapter
5 E(z) Yet pHenomenal Steps to Demystifying Magic Color-Changing Markers
In this chapter you will explore, the chemical principles that explain the “science behind the magic” of color changing markers are explored in a series of teacher-guided but learner-designed hands-on explorations....
Book Chapter
5 E(z) Steps Back Into “Deep” Time: Visualizing the Geobiological Timescale
In this chapter, you will explore a sequence of fun, participatory activities juxtapose everyday popular culture and human time perspectives with the geobiological timescale of Earth’s history of millions and billions of years. The overall timesca...
Book Chapter
5 E(z) Steps to Earth-Moon Scaling: Measurements and Magnitudes Matter
Learners are surprised to learn that most textbook illustrations incorrectly represent the relative sizes and/or distance between Earth and its single moon. Although these and other visual representations of our solar system “lie” or grossly misr...
Book Chapter
Acronyms and Acrostics Articulate Attributes of Science (and Science Teaching)
Learners’ ideas about the nature of science, school science, and science teaching are elicited by their creation of acronyms or acrostics that define key characteristics of science and teaching. An Extension activity provides discussion questions f...
Book Chapter
Tackling the Terrible Tyranny of Terminology: Divide and Conquer
Big, hard words in science are invariably made up of small, easy Greek- and Latin-based prefixes, suffixes, and root words that students can systematically learn, continually use, and creatively recombine. An unusually long science word; a simple (...
Book Chapter
Inquiring Into Reading as Meaning-Making: Do Spelling and Punctuation Really Matter?
Learners are asked to read a passage full of misspelled words. Many readers are able to discern the meaning despite the numerous intentionally embedded errors. In a second exercise, learners experience how the meaning of a passage can be dramatically...
Book Chapter
Ambiguous Text: Meaning-Making in Reading and Science
Learners are asked to read one or more passages of ambiguous, discrepant text where they understand the individual words (or “trees”) but are hard-pressed to connect the words with an overall context (or “forest”) to extract and construct mea...
Book Chapter
Glue Mini-Monster: Wanted Dead or Alive?
A drop of clear, colorless, viscous liquid (i.e., a specific brand of modeling glue) assumes the role of an unknown macroscopic, single-celled organism in this demonstration. When placed in a petri dish of water, it is observed to move and interact ...
Book Chapter
Water “Stick-to-It-Ness”: A Penny for Your Thoughts
Water (in contrast to other clear, household liquids) assumes and maintains a very distinct semispherical shape when placed on a piece of waxed paper. For related reasons, a discrepantly large number of drops of water can be placed on top of a penny...
Book Chapter
Burdock and Velcro: Mother Nature Knows Best
In this chapter’s activity, Velcro is explored as an example of a human-engineered invention that was a “copycat” inspired by a naturally evolved, “bio-engineered” seed distribution innovation....
Book Chapter
Book Chapter
Greenhouses are made almost completely of glass for two reasons. First, glass allows the maximum amount of sunlight into the building. Plants need the sunlight for photosynthesis. Second, glass prevents heat produced in the greenhouse from escaping....