JoinAll Book Chapters
Book Chapter
Live Long and Prosper: And Remember You Are Responsible
The teachers are the professionals—responsibilities include more than the education of students. The chapters in this book are meant to sharpen teachers’ observational skills so they can recognize the issues and circumstances that require attenti...
Book Chapter
Communities of Learners: Promoting Safety for Every Student
One pervasive theme in the National Science Education Standards is that goals are meant for all students—regardless of learning style, background, or ability. Supporting all learners becomes more difficult in middle school. Students exhibit greater...
Book Chapter
Where Science Happens: Equipping Your Lab for Safety
Unless a middle school facility was built fewer than 20 years ago, chances are it was originally designed and built for another purpose—a solution to an enrollment or facility problem—not an educational concept. But for inquiry-based middle schoo...
Book Chapter
Finders Keepers: Essentials of Safer Storage
It takes a lot of “stuff” to conduct a middle school science program. Middle school science teachers look enviously at their peers in the English department who neatly carry everything they need for class in a single tote bag. The science teacher...
Book Chapter
Lively Science: Live Organisms Are Worth the Work
Middle school is the perfect setting for teaching life science. Observing and studying living organisms are critical to a good, strong program. Preserved specimens, computer simulations, photographs, and videos may be excellent supplements, but they ...
Book Chapter
Modern Alchemy: Safer Teaching with Chemistry
From making mud pies in a sandbox to messing with a magic set and sending secret messages with markers that produce invisible writing, chemistry engages students’ passions for mixing things together and producing surprising results. Middle schooler...
Book Chapter
Falling for Science: Physical Science May Be Simpler Than You Think
Many students get their first exposure to quantitative physical science in middle school. The National Science Education Standards recommend that students study motions, forces, and transfer of energy during these years. These are ideal topics for pr...
Book Chapter
The Great Outdoors: Field Trips Near and Far
The classroom is rich with resources and activities, but some things simply can’t be done there. A strong investigative science program depends on providing students with the opportunity to collect and analyze data. Some data can be collected in th...
Book Chapter
This first chapter deals with one of the most basic principles of motion, which happens to be known as Newton’s first law. Not coincidentally, it has something to do with Isaac Newton. It’s a nice law to start out with because it doesn’t requir...
Book Chapter
In order to get a more complete understanding of how and why things move the way they do, it is necessary to consult with Newton one more time. Newton's Third Law, which sums up this idea of objects pushing on each other and pushing back, is discusse...
Book Chapter
Round and Round and Round in the Circle Game
If you recognize where the title of this chapter came from, then you're showing your age and your taste for FM music in the old days. For the record (and it was a record), it comes from a song written by Joni Mitchell. Anyway, this chapter is all a...
Book Chapter
Energy is such a common notion. We talk about it all the time. Should you buy energy-efficient windows? The country needs an energy policy. That little kid at the store who screaming at the top of his lungs sure has a lot of energy. This chapte...
Book Chapter
Up until now, we've been talking about things having a certain amount of energy and not about things gaining, losing, or changing their form of energy. We've already seen how energy can change, though. A marble at rest at the top of a ramp has a ce...
Book Chapter
It Slices, It Dices--It Gathers Dust!
In case you can't tell from the title, this chapter is about machines. No, not salad shooters and makers of julienne fries but rather everyday things such as scissors and bottle openers and car jacks. These are known as simple machines, and they in...
Book Chapter
Temp-a-chur and Thermal Energy
In this chapter you will learn the basic concept of temperature and what it means for one thing to be hotter than another. The hotter something is, the faster its molecules are moving. And that means that a hot collections of molecules has more kin...