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Journal Article
Editor’s Note: Conceptual Understanding
Weather. Doesn’t that sound like an easy topic to teach and learn? Children experience it without effort and without even thinking about it. But, that’s part of the problem. We need to take every opportunity to create circumstances for students t...
Journal Article
Methods and Strategies: Making the Climate Connection
This article presents classroom resources for teaching both weather and climate along with background resources for teachers who want to beef up their own knowledge in the subjects. In addition, the author proposes learning progressions that teachers...
Journal Article
It is important to help young children make connections between events in their lives and science concepts in preschool classrooms, so introducing basic meteorology ideas offer a great opportunity to make weather connections and awaken scientific cur...
Journal Article
This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer. ...
Journal Article
Fifth graders in Mrs. Caldwell’s class would soon experience a “change” as they made the transition from elementary to middle school. Participation in classroom inquiry investigations and schoolwide science enrichment events had already develop...
Journal Article
This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer. ...
Journal Article
Cruising the Climate With Spreadsheets
Electronic spreadsheets and online weather databases are excellent tools for making real-world comparisons of local, national, and global climate trends. The activities described in this article incorporate these tools to help familiarize students wi...
Journal Article
“If someone were traveling to our area for the first time during this time of year, what would you tell them to bring to wear? Why?” This question was used to engage students in a guided-inquiry unit about how climate differs from weather. In thi...
Journal Article
Science Shorts: The Reasons for the Seasons
Ask a fifth-grader why he or she believes Earth has seasons, and the answer usually involves a mistaken notion about Earth’s distance from the Sun. However, the construction of a three-dimensional model of the changing seasons using simple material...
Journal Article
Teaching Temperature With Project-Based Learning
In this project-based unit on weather, a fictional director of a Hungarian Wildlife Refuge invites fourth-grade students to determine whether the backyard of their school contained a variety of surface temperature environments that would satisfy the ...
Journal Article
Science 101: How are skyscrapers designed?
Building a structure that stands hundreds or thousands of feet in the air incorporates all aspects of the design process. There are clear goals, constraints, and trade-offs. Here the author does his best to describe these three with respect to skyscr...
Journal Article
Can students build a house that is cost effective and strong enough to survive strong winds, heavy rains, and earthquakes? First graders in Ms. Peter’s classroom worked like engineers to answer this question. They participated in a design challenge...
Journal Article
“Watch out, the stove will burn you,” “Ooh, ice cream headache!” Students construct their conceptions about heat and temperature through their own intuitions about daily life experiences. As a result, misconceptions can be born from these con...