Need a pick me up after a full day of NSTA conference sessions? Head to Cacao, a chocolate shop with the feel of an asian tea house. A shot of “drinking chocolate”–think a liquid chocolate bar, not a powdered mix—only costs $2.

Portland has a lot to offer, but if you only have time for one thing, make it Powell’s. The largest independent bookstore in the world fills a city block and features used gems tucked among the enormous selection–including a science and an education section. Plan on spending hours here! (they are open until 11)

One of my roles on the SciLinks team is to find resources for a specific topic. Using several search engines, I browse through the lists and select sites for a more intense review and approval process. You as a SciLinks user then have a list of websites for a given topic that have been reviewed and whose content has been correlated with the National Science Education Standards.
Occasionally, I come across a resource for a specific topic that is part of a larger, more general collection. I’d like to call your attention to Teachers’ Domain, sponsored by the WGBH Educational Foundation. This is an indexed and annotated collection of multimedia resources from public television. I’ve used the URL to the main site (http://www.teachersdomain.org) in the link above so that you can share it with your colleagues in other content areas.
There are so many wonderful science resources on public television, but getting these resources into the classroom used to be a challenge. We could order a tape of a program from a regional library and hope that it would be delivered in time to use in our lesson, we could purchase a copy if our budgets permitted, or we could tape off the air, with appropriate permissions, assuming that the programming matched our lesson. In the analog tape media, it was hard to pinpoint a brief clip or a series of clips.
But this digital collection solves the problem. From this site you can access hundreds of individual multimedia resources (video clips, photographs, audio files, animations, PDF documents) anytime from any computer with an Internet connection. Most of these resources have a generous use policy. All of them can be used online, most can be downloaded, and many can be shared or added to your own presentations. The site also has a set of lesson plans that integrate these resources. These lessons are very good, and many of them have been added to SciLinks. There are links to professional development opportunities offered by PBS, too.
The site can be used with or without a registration/login (which is free). I did go through the registration process, which requires that you list your school or affiliation. If your school/district is not listed, you can add it. The advantage of registering is that when you find a resource, it is correlated to your state’s academic standards. Registration also gives you access to online folders to “save” resources for future projects or lesson.
With the websites in SciLinks and the multimedia resources of Teachers’ Domain, you’ll all set to help students explore topics visually and to take students beyond the classroom walls.

Today I visited the Rainbow Preschool, a half-day preschool with extended care in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of NE Portland. Teachers Nicki and Amanda and their students welcomed me into their world where science activities include caring for two guinea pigs, digging and pouring sand, building with dominoes,  and many opportunities to use symbols to represent actions (name cards into a cup when you take your snack, job board, and daily schedule using photos).

I was reminded of an article in the September 2008 NAEYC journal Young Children, What Do Children Learn by Trying to Produce the Domino Effect? by Kyoko Ozaki, Naoko Yamamoto, Constance Kamii.
Visiting other classrooms always invigorates me and I appreciate the welcome to investigate at Rainbow Preschool. Reading journals such as, Young Children and Science and Children is another way to find out what’s happening in other programs. The article on children using dominoes particularly interested me and I hope to add them to the science room rotation of blocks soon.
Peggy

A few years ago, one of the speakers at our school’s career day was a graduate who was an environmental scientist. A student asked her what she did all day. The audience expected her to say things such as I do chemical tests. I spend all day on the river. I look at things through a microscope. I walk through the woods. I do experiments. But her answer surprised everyone. She said that she spends as much time on communications, especially on writing, as on anything else. She described how much of her work involves taking notes, writing reports, preparing presentations, writing articles for publication, writing brief updates for her funding agencies, writing and answering emails and letters, conversing with her colleagues, and writing entries in her daily log. I suspect that a similar response would come from those in many other professions and jobs, too.
So it appears that if we want our students to have authentic, real-life experiences in science, our classes will have to include more activities that involve communicating about what the students are learning. Fortunately, there are many resources to help us, including this month’s Science Scope with several articles that discuss writing in science:

• Learning to Write and Writing to Learn in Science describes refutational text – a type of persuasive writing. I was interested in this because in my state’s writing assessment, narrative writing is not assessed at the middle and high school levels. The emphasis is on persuasive and informational. The article has a copy of the rubric that the author has used and a description of how the process is modeled and integrated in the classroom.
• Using Science Journals to Encourage All Students to Write shows how writing can be a warm-up or summary activity, an assessment, or a discussion-starter. There are suggestions for modeling and guiding students through the process, a rubric, samples of feedback, and ideas for logistics.
• Science and Literacy—Making Connections Through Writing has suggestions for guiding students through responding to open-ended questions and makes an interesting connection between the inquiry process and the writing process.
• Science SLAMS—A Reading Strategy for Answering Open-Ended Questions goes beyond a description of the strategy and teaching suggestions. The author did an action research project to determine the effectiveness of using the strategy!

Another resource is SciLinks. Use the code SS110801 for websites on communications. Many of them deal specifically with reading in science. One that I like in particular is Connecting Elementary Science and Literacy. For each step of an inquiry process, this page has suggested resources for incorporating communications skills. (Although the title says “elementary” other grade levels can use this resource!)
You may also want to check out the November 2008 issue of Science and Children and the November 2007 issue of Science Scope for more articles and resources. Mention the idea of using a template for student writing, and you’ll get a variety of responses (for example, ask your English teachers about the five-paragraph essay). Some teachers feel that using templates constrains student writing to a cookie-cutter format, with little room for individuality or creativity. Others suggest that using a template can guide students through the writing process, especially students who have not had much experience in a particular style or in writing for a specific purpose. Most of us probably have a format we want students to use for a lab report or a journal entry. It’s been my experience that most students appreciate having a template (or a format or a set of guidelines) at first. After a while they can expand, customize, or embellish their work to express their creativity. It’s hard to think outside the box when you don’t know what the box is!

Do you have any suggestions for grantwriting? I’ve just been told that the budget may be very lean next year, and I’d like to try to get additional funding for the science department.
—Shug, Stillwater, OK
External funds can be very helpful in supplementing school district budgets, and competition for these funds is getting more intense. Are you looking for grants or donations/gifts? Grants from foundations or government agencies are usually focused on projects for a particular purpose or audience and come with strings attached in the form of a contract. There may be requirements for progress reports, a formal evaluation component, student achievement results, and an itemized budget. As a grantwriter, I found that the more funds you ask for, the more hoops there are to jump through! Donations or gifts usually do not have such requirements.
If you decide to seek grant funding, you’ll have to define and refine your goals and needs. Few grants will fund “brick and mortar” projects (construction or remodeling) or items that schools/districts should provide: textbooks, classroom furniture, or consumables such as workbooks or markers (unless these supplies are part of a more comprehensive project). Few grants will provide funds for resources not directly related to student learning (e.g., faculty room microwaves or water coolers).
One problem in grantwriting is looking too narrowly at a need and not seeing the big picture. I had this conversation with a teacher as we worked on a proposal (my questions are in italics):
“I need more microscopes.” Why?
“Because I don’t have enough.” What do you mean?
“I have 4 microscopes and 24 students in a class.” So what?
“It takes forever for the students to share them.” And so…?
“ If I had additional microscopes I could do more hands-on investigations.” So your point is..?
“We want to include more hands-on learning in science to help students achieve the standards.” Bingo!
This statement put the microscopes into a larger picture and was used in other proposals by the science department for professional development in inquiry science, science kits, technology applications, and attending conferences. Too often I’ve seen schools take a patchwork approach to grants, with no focus or master plan. Their projects may even be at cross-purposes and create extra work for teachers. If you align your goal and proposed activities with the school/district/department strategic plan, you’ll have a coordinated rationale for further proposals.
Give yourself enough time to gather data, create a budget, assemble resumes and letters of commitment from other agencies (if required), and get the correct signatures on the forms. Ask someone to proofread the proposal and be sure to follow any guidelines on length, formatting, the submission date, and the inclusion of extra materials.
Attend grant writing seminars sponsored by foundations, county/regional educational service agencies, or a college/university. NSTA conferences usually include sessions on grant writing, too. Check with your state department of education for any opportunities to be a grant reviewer. Training is usually provided (and sometimes a stipend), and this is a great way to see how others write proposals. Some grant projects have summaries of approved proposals and projects on their websites. Some agencies have pre-grant workshops for potential applicants.
Above all, don’t be discouraged if some of your proposals are “rejected.” (I have a whole collection of unfunded proposals.) You’ll have a lot of competition, but when your proposal is funded and your work pays off in good things for students, it’s a great feeling!
Good luck!

“Why is corn used as a decoration in the fall in the United States?” asked a student’s grandmother. She is originally from Estonia where she said seasonal decorative include straw weavings, hung as symbols to bring a good harvest in the next year. I don’t know when it became popular to hang ears of multicolored corn (Zea mays) as decoration in the United States but it may come from the harvesting of dried corn in the fall. Whatever the origin of this decoration, as symbols of a good harvest, or wishes for such in the coming year, by decorating with varieties that don’t usually appear on our plates we expose children to a variety of corn ears. The variety in corn is interesting to children and prepares them to study genetics when they are older. Worldwide, the word “corn” can refer to any local grain. (The photo at right is from the photo gallery at the  Agricultural Research Service website.)
Young children love to ‘dissect’ ears of fresh or dried corn and can learn new words while learning plant structure—first the husk, then the silk, then the harder job of picking the kernels off the cob. Place a variety of dried corn cobs in a bin or sensory table and allow children to take them apart. See the November issue of Science and Children to read about examining and measuring corn ears in The Early Years column.
Maybe in the spring you’ll plant Zea mays with your class.
Peggy