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Journal Article
Every Day Science: February 2009
This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer. ...
Journal Article
Teaching Through Trade Books: Secrets of Seeds
From a tiny radish seed to a giant coconut, seeds come in a multitude of shapes and sizes. They all share one amazing secret: the potential to grow into a new plant when conditions are right. In this month’s column, students observe a variety of se...
Journal Article
Science Conversations for Young Learners
What do you get when you add 20 kindergarten students and a student-led science discussion for the first time? Mass chaos! So, after taking some time to recover, the authors began to reflect on what they could change to help orchestrate quality scien...
Journal Article
Creating a Schoolyard Mini-Garden
The creation of schoolyard gardens is a growing movement in the United States and around the world (Ballard, Tong, and Usher 1998; Pope 1998; Lewis 2004). It brings together all of the features of authentic hands-on science: Students can collect data...
Journal Article
Editor’s Note: Plants and Their Partners
Plants are a ubiquitous piece of the elementary science curriculum. By the time they reach middle school, students have often grown enough bean seeds to feed a small city. Often these lessons don’t “grow” deeper ideas from the basic observation...
Journal Article
Methods and Strategies: Being Deliberate About Concept Development
In order to move students’ thinking from the exploration experiences to concept understanding (and thus the ability to then apply that understanding), teachers must deliberately consider students’ misconceptions, the intermediate steps to the acc...
Journal Article
Editor’s Note: Record Keeping in Science
Records show others what data you have collected and under what conditions. Without records, patterns escape notice. Records also provide accountability and allow someone else to replicate or analyze your methods. Record keeping is fundamental to sci...
Journal Article
How do you inspire students to keep records like scientists? Share the primary research of real scientists and explicitly teach students how to keep records—that’s how! Therefore, a group of third-grade students and their teacher studied the work...
Journal Article
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! Digital cameras, young inquisitive scientists, give it a try! In this project, students create an open-ended question for investigation, capture and record their observations—data—with digital cameras, and create ...
Journal Article
Practitioner Research Success!
Practitioner research is an ongoing, reflective process in which inservice teachers (i.e., practitioners) ask questions about their day-to-day teaching practice, develop plans of action to investigate these questions, draw conclusions supported by ev...
Journal Article
The Early Years: What Sort of Feather?
What do feathers have to do with flying? How is a feather like a hair? Do all feathers look the same or serve the same purpose? What does a feather look like inside? These are the type of open-ended questions to explore with your students as they han...
Journal Article
Methods and Strategies: Enhancing Science for ELLs
The elementary classroom is changing, and English Language Learners (ELLs) are frequently a part of the mainstream classroom, learning alongside of native English speaking children, even when the ELLs’ language has not yet developed fully. So, teac...