I’m getting ready for a two-week camping trip to upstate New York for a family reunion, sightseeing, and hiking/birdwatching. I’m also looking forward to propping up my feet and reading in the fresh air. As I add to my bag of reading materials, I’m referring to the summer issues of all three NSTA journals for ideas.
The Science Teacher article Take a Voyage of Discovery has suggestions for reading that will take us to special places on Earth, take us through time, and help us reflect on our own classrooms. Keep Up With a Good Book in this month’s Science Scope has even more suggestions, ranging from physical and evolutionary science to biographies of scientists. And Science and Children’s Science Books for Professional Pleasure Reading has lists organized by subjects (biology, earth and space, etc.). I like this list because of the suggested titles are all content-related. Regardless of the grade level you teach, be sure to check out all three articles!
In all three articles, the titles are annotated with a brief description. I downloaded the articles and highlighted the books that look interesting and checked off the ones I’ve already read. I’ll keep the lists in my briefcase all year to refer to. Reading professional and content-related books is an excellent form of professional development. One summer, my district bought several copies of books and gave them to interested teachers. We read the books over the summer, and during the August inservice time, we met and shared what we had read. We fixed up the library to look like a coffee shop, including pastries, and spent a wonderful morning sharing and recommending these professional resources.
Although I have downloaded articles to my laptop (legally of course!) or listened to books on tape on long drives, I’m an old-fashioned dinosaur (or Readasaurus as a student once said). I prefer the real thing when it come to books. I like the feel of the pages and being able to stop and reflect and to page back and forth. My local library is small, but it belongs to a statewide network of libraries so that I can get materials from anywhere! Of course, there’s always the online book sellers, the big book stores, and the NSTA bookstore for getting personal copies!

In the ideal world, every school would have whatever materials it takes to provide quality learning experiences. But our world is not ideal and we teachers have learned to be quite ingenious.
Although the activity in the article Discovery Bottles is written for K-2, this could be adapted into a neat idea for the first day of school at other grade levels, including secondary. The author even gives us lists of themes and what to put in the bottles as well as some questions to focus the students’ observations. I was at a workshop where the presenter used these bottles as an icebreaker. Can you visualize a room full of adults shaking the bottles and trying to identify the 20 objects she had hidden in the bottles? These were ordinary water bottles filled with birdseed instead of sand. The website Discovery Bottles also has suggestions for themes for these bottles. I could see having older students create these for younger ones, too. The article Materials Repurposed also has suggestions for using ordinary materials in making manipulatives for science activities.
The author of You Can Get What You Want describes strategies for securing donations of materials and talent from the community. In addition to the sources mentioned in the article, I’d suggest the warehouses of government agencies or colleges/universities. Many of them have periodic sales of surplus or gently used equipment. I live close to our state capital, and a few of us department chairs would go on a shopping spree every summer to the warehouse. One time we really lucked out. The state had closed a medical facility, and we were able to get several cases of unused test tubes, graduated cylinders, Petri dishes, and other glassware for a total of a few dollars! We also snagged some gently used file cabinets for $5 each. However, I’d be cautious about accepting donations of used technology (I learned this the hard way). Check with you tech coordinator for any district or school guidelines.
Everybody Loves PRISM has another view of science fairs. This topic was also the theme of the December issue of Science and Children and the associated SciLinks blog.
In the February 18 SciLinks blog entry, I mentioned Project BudBurst. And in this month’s issue of S&C, the article Project BudBurst: Analyzing Data has a wonderful idea for integrating this project into classroom activities with the question “How does geography affect plant life cycles?” The article has suggestions for adapting the activity for younger students, but this could be “kicked up a notch” for secondary students, too.
As we can see in these articles every month, one of the best resources we science teachers have is each other!

It’s always amazing to me that there is just about anything you’d want to know (and even things you didn’t know you wanted to know) on the Internet. Just a few clicks in your favorite browser and you’re off on a flight of serendipitous discovery.
While on such a flight the other day, I came across a site that caught my attention: the Poetic Table of the Elements. I did a double take – yes, it’s “poetic” not “periodic.” This intrigued me.
The site has a traditional-looking periodic table, and for each element there are poems about it. Some are factual, others are whimsical, and a few could use some editing. But it’s really fun to see what people came up with.
I continued poking around and found the Periodic Table Printmaking Project, in which artists created blocks for each of the elements. The descriptions of each element include some of its physical properties, but the interesting part is how and why the artists chose their designs.
But then I started thinking. How many of our students have been assigned the traditional “element report”? In the BI times (Before Internet), the main goal of this activity was to get students to find information about a particular element. This was usually accomplished in the library, using text resources. But today, with a few clicks in a browser (or better yet, a search in SciLinks ) students can get pictures and lots of information about the characteristics and properties of any element. Many websites on the periodic table have summary pages for each element. So finding the information is not the exercise it used to be. Why would we ask students to copy facts about an element when the information is already and readily available?
Perhaps another approach might be to ask students to do something with the information – to look for patterns, to create multimedia materials for younger students, to rename an element based on its properties (my favorite was a student who renamed helium after herself – chelsium – because people jokingly called her an airhead), or to create a picture or write a poem.
By the way, I just had to know what the writers came up with to rhyme with Ytterbium!

Whether it’s a riverbank, a lakeshore, or along an ocean or bay, the water is a popular vacation place in the summer. But what if your classroom could be extended to study these places during the school year?
Last fall, on one of the NSTA listservs, Charlie Lindgren from Massachusetts described a project his class was starting. They were studying sand and hypothesizing how and why it might differ from one location to another. The problem was – how to get sand to study. The teacher requested members of the listserv to send samples (he even offered to reimburse postage). This spring, he gave us an update on the project, which was based on a presentation he saw an at NSTA conference.
As a result of the online request, his students received samples from up and down the east coast. The results are described on the Atlantic Coast Sand Lab site. If you click on the locations on the map, you will go to an individual page for each location. By clicking on the “Return to Data” link, you will come to a table with all of the results (use the number in the far left column to see the information on that sample). The student handouts that were used in the project are available at the top of the page.
This is not a complicated website with a lot of bells and whistles, but it represents an authentic use of the technology by students and their teacher. In his listserv message, Charlie described some of the successes and shortcomings of the project and the plans for next year. The plan includes increasing the number of sand samples to include the west coast and freshwater riverbanks and lakeshores from the Appalachian region. He is requesting feedback on the project (electronically, of course) and is looking for additional samples. You can email him to provide any suggestions or for directions on submitting samples.
Here are some other resources on sand:

• Sand website from Pasadena City College
• Sand Lab booklet from the New Jersey Marine Sciences Consortium
• Sands of the World from a school in Rhode Island.
• In NSTA’s Science Objects the earth science objects have several on rocks, including sedimentary rocks.

For many teachers, the word “notebook” conjures up an image of a folder or binder in which students attach lab reports, homework, class handouts and notes, tests and quizzes, and/or completed worksheets. The students are given a list of required documents and the required order in which they should appear in the notebook. The notebooks are graded periodically on how complete they are and on whether the documents are in the required order. Teachers would tell the students to “study” from them. At the end of the school year, some students would take them home; others would casually discard them as they cleaned out their desks or lockers.
However, there’s a lot of talk about going beyond these simple organizational strategies for archives or document repositories to helping students create a more useful and personalized notebook, one that won’t be tossed away at the end of the year. These approaches recognize the importance of helping students become better at recording and analyzing data and at using writing to reflect on and communicate what they are learning.
There are many teacher websites that list the required elements for class notebooks (just Google “science notebook” for some examples). But here are some ideas that you can use to revise your class notebook activity:

• I’d start with looking at the NSTA publication Using Science Notebooks in Elementary Classroomby Michael Klentschy. Don’t be put off by the title if you’re a secondary teacher. The concepts are the same, and the strategies would be useful if your students are not used to organizing their thoughts and notes for themselves. There are many examples of students work, and I was blown away by what these little ones are doing and thinking! You can even read a sample chapter online.
• Science Notebooks in K-12 Classrooms produced by the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership in Washington state is a an excellent resource, with lots of examples of student work, templates, and documents – including many in Spanish.
• Using Science Notebooks K-8 is a teacher resource provided by the Tucson Unified School District with suggestions for using notebooks, their benefits and advantages, and LOTS of examples of student work.
• If you’re an NSTA member, you can download several articles for FREE from NSTA’s Science Store including Science Notebook Essentials by Michael Klentschy.
• The Scientist’s Notebook Toolkit from the East Bay Collaborative in Rhode Island is another resource that is rich in suggestions and examples.
• The Interactive Notebook Tutorial was designed by a California teacher to acquaint her students with creating and using notebooks. But teachers can learn, too.
• The ERIC Digest, Science Notebooks: Tools For Increasing Achievement Across the Curriculum, provides a rationale for using science notebooks and discusses their effect on learning.

One thing that I like about many of these books, articles, and online resources is their inclusion of lots of examples of students work. Secondary teachers will be amazed at the depth of knowledge expressed by younger students! And I’m sure we’ll think: If these students can do it, so can mine! But I suspect that these students did not catch on to a new approach to notebooks right away, especially if they have had many years of explicit directions on exactly what papers and information to put in a notebook. Their teachers had to provide lots of modeling, feedback, and persistence to get to the point where the notebook is an integral part of their science classes. But any teacher I’ve talked to about these notebooks says that it is worth the effort.
Of course, if students don’t see a useful purpose for their notebooks, the notebooks become just another item to carry around. By following up on activities, revisiting past assignments or notes, and using the notebooks during projects or open-ended assessments, students can see the value of having a notebook.

It’s summer and maybe some of us are involved in writing/revising the science curriculum for our schools. Rather than just creating a laundry list of topics to be “covered” based on a textbook table of contents, you might be looking for some resources that combine content with inquiry processes, that are a comprehensive set of classroom activities with materials and multimedia components, and that include references to your state’s standards.
I recently came across the materials available through the Office of Science Education at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The main page has many resources and is worth a look, but I was impressed by what I found when I clicked on the Curriculum Supplements link. These are arranged by grade level (high school, middle school, and elementary levels). You can request a print copy for some of them, but the complete resource is available on line for all of them.
These are called “supplements,” but these are more complete that most resources I’ve seen! Each one has a content summary, and the web versions have suggestions for classroom use and links to multimedia activities. The teacher’s guide has background information on the topic, a wealth of classroom resources including a student manual, and all of the materials can be downloaded as PDF files. The student activities link leads to the multimedia and animations that complement the print and web-based materials.
Another neat feature is the alignment of these supplements to the state standards. On the page listing the supplements for each level, there is a link to the “state standards” for each one. I clicked on my state for one of the supplements, and not only were the relevant science standards listed, but also the relevant standards in mathematics, health, and communications!
Some of the topics in the high school supplements include cell biology and cancer, infectious diseases, human genetics, the brain, and cellular/molecular biology. The middle school topics include inquiry, healthy behaviors, the skeletal and muscular systems, the brain, mental illness, and chemicals in the environment. The elementary topic (right now there is only one) is on teeth and oral health.
Many of these individual supplements have been added to SciLinks over the years. They rate highly in the SciLinks rubrics for design and resource integration. It’s great to see all of the NIH resources in one place! Why re-create what you can get here?

Teachers (and administrators) love so see the word “free.” FREE in this case stands for Federal Resources for Excellence in Education. This website, maintained by the U.S. Department of Education, has links to hundreds of web-based resources, categorized by subject area. These sites are submitted by U.S. agencies, such as NASA, NOAA, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, most of the cabinet agencies, the National Archives, the National Park Service, the Census Bureau, and a number of others.
This is a goldmine of excellent resources. For example, the latest updates in science include a video on nanotechnology, an overview of NASA missions, a lesson idea for helping students understand the concept of a “planet,” and a lesson idea in which elementary students create a system for filtering gray water. But I also enjoy looking at the sites in other content areas. The newest topics include teaching with spreadsheets, excerpts from the diaries of 19th century pioneers traveling to the Pacific coast, and an overview of the artwork of M.C. Escher. All without leaving my laptop!
Rather than trying to remember to check the site for new updates, you can subscribe to a RSS feed (directions are on the site), or you can get on the mailing list and receive an e-mail message each month with links to the newest sites added.

What do you get when you combine knowledge, passion, experience, and some fantastic graphics? A friend sent me the link to a TED video of Robert Ballard’s talk on Exploring the Ocean’s Hidden Worlds. I thought I was fairly knowledgeable, but during his riveting talk, it became apparent how little we actually know about the seafloor. As he states, we know more about the surface of the moon than about the floor of the ocean. People enjoying a summer day at the beach have very little knowledge or appreciation of what lies beyond (and below). This is a frontier that we should be exploring, for the resources that lie below the ocean floor as well as for the study of the fantastic life forms there. This video is well worth 20 minutes of your time or your students’ time (yes, it can be downloaded).
The Internet has many other resources, but you can find relevant ones on exploring the ocean floor by logging into SciLinks and using the keyword ocean. Regardless of the grade level, you’ll find websites that are interesting, even if you don’t live near the oceans. Some of my favorites include Ocean Explorer from NOAA (which has archives of explorations starting with 2001), Dive and Discover: Expeditions to the Sea Floor from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (I’ve spent a lot of time poking around this one, including the teacher section), and Sea Floor Mapping from NOAA (this game-like activity is designed for younger elementary students).
To increase your own background knowledge, check out NSTA’s Science Objects. These free (yes, free) online resources for teachers are self-directed and provide relevant information on many topics. Related to oceanography, you’ll find topics in Earth Science such as Plate Tectonics (I’ve done these five Objects myself) and Oceans Effect on Climate and Weather (a series of four Objects). Also look at the Life Science list. The four Coral Reef Ecosystem objects review the physical and biological factors in the formation of coral reefs.
The part that I appreciated the most in Ballard’s presentation was his plea for more “jaw-dropping” moments in our schools (he mentions middle schools in particular), when our students are inspired by scientific learning and explorations and begin to make connections between this knowledge and their own lives. Having been a middle school teacher, I can agree that this enthusiastic age is the time for laying the groundwork for this sense of wonder and for an interest in further study in the sciences, whether as a career or an area of personal interest. What happens to the sense of curiosity and wonder of younger students as they progress through school?

In previous entries, I’ve mentioned the online, collaborative projects that are part of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s (CLO) Citizen Science program. Well, they’ve done it again! The Spring 2008 issue of Birdscope, (an excellent newsletter with an online version), describes the newest CLO project, CamClickr. After 9 years of nest-camming, the Lab has collected more than 7 million images from nest box cameras from across the country. These images are valuable data to answer research questions such as How do feeding rates change throughout the day? How do feeding rates change as the babies grow? What is the frequency of feeding by males as compared to females? But at this point, the images are not organized and categorized. This is where the Camclickr (yes, that’s the way they spell it) project fits in.
The Camclickr site is designed to provide a way for anyone to assist with this project, and you don’t have to be an ornithologist or bird watcher to participate. So I decided to give it a try. After logging in (you can create a login or use an existing login from another CLO project), you launch the Camclickr. You get a screen with 9 photographs and a sidebar with the categories, which are based on the presence/absence of adults in the nest. You drag and drop the photo into the appropriate category. It’s like creating a scrapbook or photo album. The site keeps track of how many you do each session, and you can review the categories to change any entries that are not correct. Save and Logout enters your work into the database. It took me a little while to make out what I was looking at, because the photos I had were from the top of the birdhouse. Each photo has a location, date, and time stamped on it, and you can enlarge the picture to get a better view. The photos can also be printed. After categorizing a set of photos, you then move to “Level 2” in which you are given your scrapbook, and for each photo in it you describe the behavior of the adults and the nestlings (from a menu). The site keeps track of what level you’re on and how many “points” you have earned. There are links to live nest cams and other resources. Right now, it’s in the beta testing version, so you and your students can be in from the beginning of the real-world, authentic project.
For more information on birds, go to SciLinks and use the keyword “birds” and your grade level. You’ll find a variety of sites, including Migratory Bird Center from the National Zoo, Aves from the University of Michigan, and Birds, Birds, Birds from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.