The March 10-13, 2011 National Science Teachers Association’s national conference in San Francisco promises many good sessions for early childhood (preK-2) teachers as well as for the older grades. Take a look at the preliminary schedule on the NSTA conference website and read more about these sessions, just a few of the many offered:
 (HINT: search for keywords such as “childhood”, “preschool”, “primary” and “kindergarten”)
Thursday, March 10
8:00–9:00 AM

• Budding Scientist

2:00–3:00 PM

• Newton’s Laws for Preschoolers…Who Knew?!
• Parents as Partners in a Dual Language After-School Program

3:30–4:30 PM

• An Online Assessment Tool for Preservice Early Childhood and Elementary Students

Friday, March 11
8:00–11:00 AM

• SC-10: The Young Scientist: Engaging Three- to Five-Year-Old Children in Science (Ticketed Event)

9:30–10:30 AM

• Mathematically Rich Preschool Environments as the Foundation for Scientific Inquiry

11:00 AM–12:00 PM

• Creating Scientific Drawings and Recordings with Kindergartners
• NSTA Press Session: Picture-Perfect Science K–4

3:30–4:30 PM

• Learning, Teaching, and Science Curricula in Preschool Contexts

Saturday, March 12
8:00–9:00 AM

• BLOCKS Presents: Let’s Talk Dirt!
• Small Children and Inquiry-based Science: A Reggio Emilia Approach
• You Can’t Catch ME! I’m the Gingerbread Man! Developing Science-based Units Using Children’s Literature

9:30–10:30 AM

• Blocks Presents: Little Hands Making Big Moves in Science

11:00 AM–12:00 PM

• Getting Started with Farm to School Projects: Teaching Across the Curriculum and Fighting Childhood Obesity
• Young Learners Meet the Scientific Process
• K–12 Multiculutral Share-a-Thon

2:00–3:00 PM

• Exuberant Exploration: Creating a Strong Preschool Science Program
• They Weren’t Teaching Science!

3:30–4:30 PM
Notice and Wonder: An Exploration of Inquiry for Preschoolers

• Science, Technology, and the Northern Ohio and Erie Canal

Sunday, March 13
8:00–9:00 AM

• Advantages of Open-ended vs. Directed Activities
• Exploring the Myth of “The” Scientific Method
• Inside the Body: The View from Grades K–3

9:30–10:30 AM

• Thinking BIG, Learning BIG: Connecting Science, Math, Literacy, and Language in Early Childhood
• Using Notebooks to Enhance Science Skills

11:00 AM–12:00 PM

• Designing Lessons to Impact Environmental Identity Development in Children 
• The Language of Science: “I See What You Mean”
• How Do You Engage Minority Families in Science Education?
• Fight Bac! Integrating Food Safety into Your Elementary Classroom
• Flutter and Float

Tell us about your best ever conference session, or one that you are presenting at a conference this year. What should we look for in planning our conference schedule?
Peggy

In celebration of the International Year of Chemistry, NSTA and NBC Learn have teamed up with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch “Chemistry Now,” a weekly, online, video series that uncovers and explains the science of common, physical objects in our world and the changes they undergo every day. The series also looks at the lives and work of scientists on the frontiers of 21st century chemistry.

“Chemistry Now” consists of 32 learning packages that aim to break down the chemistry behind things such as cheeseburgers and chocolate or soap and plastics. NSTA is developing middle and high school lessons to accompany each learning package. A new topic will be explored each week starting in January and running through May. The series will then resume in the fall of 2011 to keep pace with the academic school year, and the series is available cost-free on www.NBCLearn.com and www.NSF.gov.

NSTA will also post portions of each package in this blog, under the Chemistry Now category, and we hope readers will try them out in the classroom and leave comments below each posting about how well the information worked in real-world classrooms. And if you had to make significant changes to a lesson, we’d love to see what you did differently, as well as why you made the changes. Leave a comment, and we’ll get in touch with you with submission information.

Now, to the week one offering, the Chemistry of Water.

---

 

Video: “Water: H₂O Molecules Made Clear” explains the structure, polarity, cohesive and adhesive properties that makes H₂O a chemical essential for life. The video is located at the top right of the collection of resources.

Middle school lesson: the purpose of this lesson is to give students an understanding of water’s density as a liquid and solid.

High school lesson: this lesson will help students understand water’s polarity by examining its Lewis dot structure, discussing the strength of the covalent bonds, and performing a class experiment.

You can use the following form to e-mail us edited versions of the lesson plans:

[contact-form 2 “ChemNow”]

I like to think of science as the process of discovering or creating knowledge. Sure it has many other definitions, but to me, in its most basic form science generates information, and that information is understood and communicated by humans as knowledge.
An engine, on the other hand, is often described as a machine for converting any of various forms of energy into mechanical force and motion. But further definitions include an engine as something used to effect a purpose or computer software that performs a fundamental function especially of a larger program.
It is this latter definition that was the likely use of naming Wolfram Alpha a “Knowledge Engine.” However, it is the second one, something used to effect a purpose, that I particularly like.
An oldie but a goodie: Wolfram Alpha shows data in a way Google can’t.
Reading the above story about the so-called knowledge engine named Wolfram Alpha (abbreviated W|A), it made me wonder about the pros and cons of of what I like to call recreational data mining.
The classic web search engines of the past decade and a half gave anyone using the net access to a huge number of resources about almost any subject. The read-write web of the past few years allowed one to fill in the gaps with known information thus adding to the overall body of net-based knowledge. Image databases and mapping interfaces further pushed the level of information mashing. But Wolfram Alpha is yet another leap forward.
Having played with W|A on and off since it went live on online, I’ve found it an interesting way to explore subjects, or rather the intersection of subjects. Considering the potential of recreational data mining, it would be interesting to have a place where curious results could be published. The danger, of course, is there might not be a useful or even rational connection between the searched subjects that were forced together possibly against their will. But if science is the creation or discovery of knowledge, then using W|A is, in fact, science.
Like all emerging tech, early adopting educators test-drove the tech then posted their adventures and observations online. W|A is no exception. Here’s a W|A education discussion board: The Education Community Forum for Wolfram Alpha.
Even as science educators get up to speed with W|A, the next generation of products is already on the way. Given Wolfram’s origins within mathematics software, math was the natural place to start, but science topics are on the list as well. What am I talking about? Why Wolfram Course Assistant Apps of course.
But like many of our digital dilemmas—including spell check, electronic calculators, digital balances, GPS, and GO-TO telescopes—that all rudely displaced their ancestors, questions arose that directly addressed the very nature of why we do what we do. For instance: Wolfram education apps raise teaching dilemma.
Another definition of an engine is “something that produces a particular and usually desirable result.” Hopefully the future of relational databases will pursue this definition as well. But alas, there is yet another definition for engine, and although an obsolete usage of the word, its etymology might be something to keep in mind—“engine: a torture implement.”

For any who did not get a chance to read the wonderfully supportive statement by the National Science Teachers Association president, Alan McCormack in the 12/7/10 NSTA Reports It’s Time for More Early Childhood Science, take a look and then make a copy for your director, principal, and superintendant. You might want to post it or quote from it in a note home to your students’ families. Let them know that it is not only early childhood educators who believe that “We need to help kids begin their magnificent journey into science as early in life as possible.” Teachers in middle and high school want their students to come to class having had many experiences with the natural world.

Several years ago, I did a series of workshops entitled “What’s in Your Assessment Toolkit?” so I appreciated both the cover and the theme of this month’s issue of Science Scope. Whatever vocabulary we use (assessment, test, exam, etc) the purpose, according to the editor, is the same: to determine what students know before a lesson starts, to monitor if they are “getting it” as the lesson unfolds, and to measure what they have mastered at the end of instruction.
A professor of mine once said “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” Having a variety of tools in our toolkits helps us to use different ways to determine what students are learning.

At the beginning of a lesson or unit, pre-assessments often uncover student misconceptions. A Different Spin on Coriolis: Applying Frame of Reference describes common misconceptions about the Coriolis Effect and includes several activities to help students understand the concept better. (A teacher-created video on frame of reference was recently shared in the NSTA listserves) (SciLinks: Coriolis Effect)
We all want our students to perform high-level tasks, but students may not have the prerequisite skills. Deconstructing to Instruct shows how a teacher broke down the tasks she was asking students to perform into chunks of knowledge and skills and then provided appropriate instruction in the missing pieces (such as compare/contrast or interpreting a data table). There are examples of how the author structures her assessment to learn where students need additional instruction.
Using Formative and Alternative Assessments to Support Instruction and Measure Student Learning is a mouthful of a title!  But then again, this article has lots of ideas. The author describes her journey in helping students learn through using a variety of assessments. She incorporates formative assessment (ungraded) into bellringers and pretests, and she also uses lab reports to identify misconceptions and learning gaps. There is also a discussion of differentiating assessments, including examples and rubrics.
If it’s science fair time in your school (and science projects can be a form of summative assessment), see the article Putting the Science Back in the Science Fair, which focuses on a challenging component: finding researchable questions (this topic is also the theme of the December 2010 issue of Science and Children). The article includes a rubric for science projects. (SciLinks: Science Fair)
Students (and adults!) have many misconceptions about the phases of the moon. But changing these misconceptions requires more than just telling people the correct information. A High-Stakes-Test Intervention shows how teachers used engaging, hands-on activities that were purposefully designed to improve students understanding. The authors include instructions (based on the 5E model), examples of student work, and samples of assessment questions. (SciLinks: Moon Phases)
SciLinks also has resources related to the science content of several articles:

• Population 75 Trillion: Cells Organelles, and Their Functions Cell Structures
• Scope’s Scoops (in the print version of the journal)     Anthropology, Sharks, Galaxies
• Ain’t She Sweet—Bats, Rackets, Golf Clubs, and All Energy and Sports