Join NSTA in Minneapolis this October 27–29, 2016, for our first area conference on science education. Our outstanding program will have something for science teachers of all subject areas and experiences. With featured speakers who will leave you inspired, to sessions that will give you more resources than you can possibly use, the upcoming NSTA Area Conference in Minneapolis is the place you need to be.

To help you make the most of the professional development opportunities available at the Minneapolis conference, the Conference Committee has planned the conference around three strands that explore topics of current significance, enabling you to focus on a specific area of interest or need.

Teaching Science in a Connected World

Students and teachers have access to many forms of technology. These technologies can be effective tools to access information, deliver instruction, communicate ideas, connect with people from around the world, and build professional learning networks. Educators attending these sessions will explore instructional materials, technologies and strategies for effective learning for students and adults, and responsible use of digital resources and processes.

STEMify Instruction Through Collaboration Across the Curriculum

STEM can be a powerful unifying theme across the curriculum and in many settings. STEM provides an opportunity for collaboration among teachers, disciplines, and schools, as well as postsecondary, informal education, and community partners. Educators attending sessions in this strand will explore models of integrated STEM education programs, learn strategies to productively STEMify lessons, and investigate how to effectively engage students.

Celebrating Elementary Science and Literacy Connections

Children are born investigators. Science is an engaging way to develop students’ skills in thinking creatively, expressing themselves, and investigating their world. Reading, writing, and speaking are inspired through science experiences. Educators attending these sessions will gain confidence in teaching science, learn strategies for literacy and science integration, and celebrate elementary science. 

We hope to see you in Minneapolis in October! Save the date, line up your subs, and please check back here in early June for registration information.

Author Jean Tushie is a High School Biology Teacher and the MnSTA conference coordinator. As a former NSTA council and board member, Tushie is NSTA’s biggest cheerleader!

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

Future NSTA Conferences

5th Annual STEM Forum & Expo, hosted by NSTA

• Denver, Colorado: July 27–29

2016 Area Conferences

• Minneapolis, Minnesota: October 27–29
• Portland, Oregon: November 10–12
• Columbus, Ohio: December 1–3

National Conferences

• Los Angeles, California: March 30–April 2, 2017
• Atlanta, Georgia: March 15–18, 2018
• St. Louis, Missouri: April 11–14, 2019
• Boston, Massachusetts: March 26–29, 2020
• Chicago, Illinois: April 8–11, 2021

Follow NSTA

I’m looking for suggestions for what to do during the last week of school, after final exams are over. I teach high school chemistry.  —T., Maryland

It’s hard to justify students (and parents) why students should come to school on the last days of the year, if all they do is watch videos, do busywork, talk to or text each other, have one study hall after another, or roam the halls. The last few days of the school year can be a gift of time for explorations and enrichment activities.

But the end of the year is a busy time for you, too. Your after-school time is probably spent on grading exams, evaluating projects, finalizing inventories, or preparing final grades. So the last thing you need is planning additional activities to keep students busy.

Here are some learning-related alternatives that won’t require a lot of preparation:

• My students enjoyed vocabulary games, such as variations on Jeopardy or A card sort or word splash is easy to put together. In science charades, each team creates a pantomime of a vocabulary term or science process for other students to figure out (it’s amazing what they can do with mitosis or Newton’s laws).
• Dig out those lab activities or online simulations you wanted to do during the year but didn’t have time.
• You could ask them to work in groups to come up with a “guide” for next year’s class –something like The Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Chemistry Class or Chemistry Class FAQs (and Answers). You could make this open-ended or you could give different topics to the groups (e.g., lab safety, study skills, lab procedures, difficult topics, or how to use a science notebook. You may need to model a few appropriate ideas before they start. The groups could share and debrief with each other, perhaps as a gallery walk. This could also be an informal evaluation survey, since you’ll get to see what they thought was essential or important enough to share. And be sure to share a composite list with your students at the beginning of next year.
• Have students try out a new technology tool or app. Assign an app to each group and ask them to demonstrate it and describe how it would (or would not) be useful for students in your class next year. You can be part of the audience.

I would be cautious about having students assist with lab cleanup or inventories. You would need to supervise both those who are helping you and those who are not. The liability may not be worth the extra help.

If grades are turned in, it may be hard to get students to participate in any activities, especially if students expected points that “counted” for every activity and they know that grades are calculated. You might also hear “But Mr. B gave us a study hall.” Be persistent. I suspect that most students would rather have a planned enjoyable activity to do (even though they might grumble about it).

A wise teacher once advised me to start planning for the last week during the first week of school. Take photos or videos of activities and equipment during each unit, and have students write captions for them at the end of the year. Prepare vocabulary lists ahead of time, or (better yet) have students make the lists in their notebooks.

Time is a precious commodity. We never have enough, so let’s not waste any of it.

Please welcome guest blogger, Brooke Shoemaker, who brings her museum education expertise to The Early Years blog. Brooke was a pre-k classroom educator at the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center (SEEC) in Washington, D.C. for four years, before joining SEEC’s outreach arm, the Center for Innovation in Early Learning as the Pre-K Museum Education Specialist. You can read SEEC teachers’ reflections on their practice on the SEEC blog. 

SEEC invites you to join them for a two-day seminar, “Play: Engaging Learners in Object Rich Environments,” on June 28^th and 29^th, to explore how to use play as a vehicle for engaging young children in the classroom, museum, and community. 

As early childhood educators, we know play is important, but how can we utilize play to engage students in the classroom, museums, and the community? At the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center, we playfully approach object-based learning to engage our young learners and help them make connections between concepts being taught and the world around them. Object-based learning represents a framework for teaching and learning that engages students in a process of understanding the world and its complexity through the study of objects.

This past fall, my co-teacher Tina Brimo and I decided to explore the topic of oceans with our class of three-year-olds because every time we walked through The Sant Ocean Hall at The National Museum of Natural History the children were full of questions about the animals and objects they saw.  Tina and I wanted to present the science, technology, engineering and math concepts in the lessons playfully through hands-on, teacher-guided play, as well as unstructured, child-directed play opportunities, such as dramatic, and symbolic play.   

To begin our exploration of oceans, we went to The Sant Ocean Hall where children’s curiosity was sparked, and created an ocean web graphic organizer to record questions that the students had, and wanted to learn about over the course of the unit.  One of the questions that day was, “Why do seashells open up?”, so I knew we would have to learn about bivalves at some point during the unit!  But how do you make a lesson about bivalves for preschoolers playful and engaging?

The objectives for the bivalve lesson were to understand that bivalves are animals that have two shells that enclose them, which serve as protection, and that those two shells are symmetrical.  To help make these concepts more concreate, I used a collection of seashells and two sculptures in the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Dan Graham’s sculpture, For Gordon Bunshaft, was a perfect object to introduce the idea that bivalves are enclosed in two shells.  We were able to sit inside the piece and pretend to be bivalves ourselves.  We talked about how the walls of the sculpture made us feel safe and protected from the outside elements, just like the shells of a bivalve do. 

While sitting inside the sculpture I passed around the collection of bivalve shells, and the students made observations about the size, shape, and texture.  We noticed that the shells’ hardness made them ideal for protection.  Noticing and describing size, shape, and symmetry demonstrates a beginning understanding of geometry.

Then we turned our attention to Ellsworth Kelly’s sculpture, Untitled, to introduce the idea of symmetry.  As the children observed the sculpture, they noticed that it looked like a circle folded in half, and that each half was exactly the same or symmetrical.  The children explored the collection of shells again, this time putting two shells together.  Children noticed that if two shells were mismatched, or asymmetrical, the shells left openings on the sides, however, symmetrical shells closed snugly, and therefore protected the bivalve.  The class practiced their careful looking skills by playing a game to match shells to their symmetrical counterpart.  To end the lesson the children used their fine motor skills to cut a shape out of a folded piece of paper, yielding a shape that was the symmetrical on both sides.  They called these their bivalves, and had a blast making them open and close.  The children gained early engineering understanding through examining how the symmetrical shells fit together, as well as learning about the mechanics of bivalves.

That afternoon in our classroom, we used technology to watch several videos to see how bivalves move. The children were curious to see how bivalves move around since they do not have legs like humans do. The videos helped the children visualize bivalve movement, which they were having a hard time imagining.  After watching the videos we jumped like a cockle to get away from a sea star, we swam like a scallop by opening and closing our shell, and wiggled back and forth like a clam to bury ourselves in the sand.  Reflecting on the lesson I realize the videos could have been used to begin the lesson so that the children had a better idea of how they move, before delving into the mechanics of bivalves.

The students were exposed to concepts in multiple ways through art, hands-on objects, and kinesthetic learning, which made the concepts more concrete. They were playfully engaged with bivalves in different ways including exploring shells through touch, practicing fine motor skills, and using their bodies and imaginations.  Through these playful techniques, bivalves came alive for the children.

We designed other playful experiences to teach the children about the biology of ocean animals. We explored how coral reefs are made by observing the physical attributes of live and preserved cora
l in the Sant Ocean Hall and a photograph of a coral reef in the museum’s Nature’s Best Photography Exhibit, by using our fine motor skills to build coral out of pipe cleaners, and by reading about how reefs are formed through the lifecycle of coral polyps.  To end the lesson, the children used their bodies to create a coral reef. By engaging their bodies, the kids were up and moving (always a plus for young children), mimicking the various shapes of coral, and coming together to create a coral reef.   

We also explored the physical characteristics of stingrays, specifically their flat bodies which mean that they cannot see what they eat.  We pretended to eat like stingrays by feeling inside a mystery box and trying to detect what plastic food was inside.  Through imagining what it might be like to be a stingray, the children continued to learn about the variety of body structures found in the oceans’ living organisms, and what these structures mean for the animals’ lives. After feeling a real sea star, and counting its legs, the children put cones on their feet, hands, and head to illustrate the five points. 

While the above examples were teacher-guided playful lessons, Tina and I also observed the children spontaneously exploring and communicating about the ocean life content through their child-directed play.  For example, one child ran up to me on the playground and said, “Look, I made a whale, it has eyes and a tail!”  I followed him to a spot on the playground where he had cleared fallen leaves to make a whale shape. After learning about octopus, one child grabbed a handful of stilts, and said, “Hey Tina, these suction cups are coming for you!”  Another child found a torn ball on the playground, opened it up said, “Look, it’s a bulbous octopus head.” Even when playing with pretend food, the children found a way to use it for ocean play.  The children attached pieces of yarn to the Velcro strip on plastic pears, and made them move like jellyfish. Playful lessons were essential in creating engaging experiences for the students to learn content about life in the ocean, but the children’s play also helped us to know what content they understood, and what they wanted to learn more about.   

Through the playful and hands-on experiences in the museums and community, our class was able to learn about diverse animal life in the ocean.  Handling objects helps make concepts more concrete and real, and playful approaches make content more engaging for children.