Science Education Idea Exchange

I don't remember if I learned about this strategy independently or in professional development, but I love "My Favorite No" from the Teaching Channel. Here's how it works: Ask students to write responses to a quick check-for-understanding question on index cards. Sort through the answers to select a common mistake. Share it with the students, reminding them it's your favorite no. Ask students to identify what the mystery student did right. Finally, ask what errors students notice and explain why the answer is incorrect. At first, my students found it uncomfortable. No one likes to feel like they are being called out. I made sure not to name anyone. In hindsight, I could have asked them to leave the cards without names. Eventually, students found it a great learning tool and a way to self-check. Click here to read the original article and see the video. Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash

P2R's are a concept I created for encouraging active reading for my students based on other ideas and research I have seen. Here's an example in the works below: As students are completing the preview and read section, I circulate to help answer any questions. It is a great way to help students with words they don't know without them raising their hands and feeling embarrassed, especially since I require them to list at least one word. This is a natural way to differentiate to your readers as well. The review section can be tailored however you see fit. I've included graphs, calculations, big-picture short answer questions to name a few. I believe it's important to get students reading!

I am proud to announce that I have created lesson plans over the NGSS standards for middle school life science on Molecules to Organisms for 7th grade. You can find the lesson plans for the substring one and two here. To provide you with an idea of what in includes, I have screenshots of some of the table of contents for the two of them. For MS-LS1-1, I included a lab where students try to create a working definition of life. This is hard for students. There are resources to help guide them toward it while looking at examples of living and nonliving things. MS-LS1-1  MS-LS1-2 includes a lab that my students have really enjoyed as well as readings to help build their understanding of cells. Students will create a cell analogy to further demonstrate their understanding of cell structures and functions. MS-LS1-2 Both include a critical thinking question to assess student understanding over the standard. I have allowed my students to research the question to help formu...

Quizziz  is another free teacher resource for review. It's great because it has a bank of questions written by other teachers that you can tap into. I created many review games for students and posted them on Google Classroom within minutes. There are three ways to run Quizziz that your students will enjoy, two that can be completed individually and one as a class. To "Play Live" means that you display a code and your students compete against each other while they are seated together. Unlike Kahoot, you do not have to wait until everyone is logged in to begin. It rates students individually on speed and accuracy as they complete the game. "Assign HW" is what you will want to choose to place it on your Google Classroom for students to complete individually. After you choose "Assign HW', you will see the following screen below. 1. Choose a date far enough in the future to allow students to complete the Quizziz. I usually gave them this as...

We have been out of school for two weeks and I am already losing track of which day is which! Apparently, I need to consult my planner more than I originally thought. There are so many types of graphic organizers out there! Here are a couple that I really like: Connections, Points & Questions Ready-Set-Go-Whoa!