Early Years Column.

This article explores a lesson on structure and function in an inclusive first grade classroom. The class is co-taught by a general and special education teacher. The lesson describes how the teachers co-teach through team teaching to plan for possible barriers and use universal design principles to ensure their lesson is accessible to all students.

Teaching Through Trade Books

Teacher-facilitated whole-class conversations can help elementary students apply the full power of the NGSS science and engineering practices to an engineering design process. In this article we describe and provide examples for five kinds of Design Talks. Each type of Design Talk centers on a different framing question and is facilitated by specific prompts that help students voice their ideas and make connections to others’ ideas. Problem-Scoping Talks provide opportunities for students to identify and scope design problems (NGSS Practice 1) with multiple technical, material, and social considerations. Idea Generation Talks help a whole class collectively generate many design ideas (Practice 6). Design-in-Progress Talks help students express ideas about why a design performed as it did and consider what its performance means for their next iteration (NGSS Practices 2 and 4). Design Synthesis Talks support students to reason across these designs and synthesize common themes (Practices 2 and 4). Impact Talks invite students to consider questions like, “should we design this?”, and “who might this solution benefit and who might it harm?” (Practices 1 and 8). Teachers can implement Design Talks to invite and leverage different student strengths in engineering design, with particular attention to issues of equity and care.

School districts across the United States are actively exploring avenues to aid elementary-aged Gifted and Talented (GT) students in conducting student-driven research, value science within their local community, develop students’ science practices and soft skill acquisition. This “Methods and Strategies” describes how a district-wide program integrated novel emerging technologies to improve elementary GT students’ abilities to research a topic of their own interest, in conjunction with a science professional within their community related to that topic, and present their findings at a public symposium. We discuss how use of emerging technologies afforded students a new way to access scientific content via 3D visualization and provided a virtual platform to present their ideas. We share a case of GT students who researched and presented on local bee conservation. Guided by Science and Engineering Practices (grades 3-5) and emerging technologies, participating students developed strategies to conserve bees and presented their findings to members of the local scientist and lay communities. We provide a rubric to support formative assessment of students’ science practices and soft skills during a symposium event for generative feedback. We provide guidance for other community-science and GT programs to enhance students’ research and presentation experiences through emerging technology integration.

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Many elementary science teachers have faced some challenges in implementing meaningful and equitable modeling practices in online science instruction that is aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. Integrating technology tools into modeling practices in project-based learning environments can support meaningful and equitable modeling practices by promoting the development of student agency, the use of diverse modalities, and collaboration. Through an example lesson on the changing shape of earth features, we illustrate how a teacher can help students with varying levels of language learn about earth’s systems by collaboratively developing an explanatory model of vegetation and soil interaction to represent their ideas. We conclude by discussing in what ways this lesson supports meaningful and equitable participation in modeling practices.

Making science accessible is an important and worthy goal, but for many students, science is inaccessible because what counts as science in the classroom is narrowly defined as what is known as western science, rooted in Europe in the 1600s and often privileging white, male-centric perspectives. In this article, we describe five examples of expanding what counts as science to help remove barriers to learning and to make school science more equitable and inclusive. Indigenous ways of knowing can complement western ways of thinking. Black botany provides examples of how Black scientists and farmers have shaped best practices for agriculture and sustainable land management while fighting for economic and food justice. Feminist perspectives on science redefine what counts as objectivity, while queer science challenges what is considered normal. Finally, neurodivergent sensemaking illustrates how people with autism have applied their strengths to provide new insights into how the world works. Expanding what counts as science helps us value multiple ways of sensemaking, see and hear the science in what all children say and do, and recognize the brilliance of all children in our classrooms.