Science Education Idea Exchange

I finished the next objective lesson plans called:  MS-PS1-3 Natural to Synthnetic Materials Lesson Plans . I added a brief introductory activity and a critical thinking to round out the research project. See below for more information: Students learn what it means to have synthetic materials versus natural ones in a jigsaw activity. Afterward, they are assigned a synthetic material to research costs, benefits, and uses. They will demonstrate their understanding by creating a finished product and answering a critical thinking question. The six-day lesson plans included can be shared digitally with students. The project is no prep! Simply upload or print the materials and go!  

  I have conducted many project-based lessons that last days to a few weeks. I implemented a couple of strategies to help manage the flow. Break-Down of Deadlines : The most important thing is to know the big checkpoints in the project. Start with the end in mind. When does everything need to be completed? Then, work backward based on the pace of your average students. Share these deadlines with students as a roadmap of their project and daily their goal for the end of the class. Even better still, share the deadlines with parents and guardians so they can help check in with their students. Roster of Progress : Write the deadlines you created into a spreadsheet or roster with all the students' names. If they have partners, group them on the progress monitoring sheet. When students complete each deadline, mark it on the sheet. Now, you see what students need additional support and how the class is doing with the progress. Photo by  Alexis Brown  on  Unsplash

  Photo by  Triana Nana  on  Unsplash I am just really enjoying using the poor weather outside to create! My latest creation is using slime recipes to teach students about mutations and their impacts on organisms, especially asexual organisms. It can be found here .

 I just finished adding materials for all five standards to help engage students in learning about ecosystems. The bundle of resources comes at a discount and can be found here ! The resources included are simulations, projects, and labs.  Stay tuned for my part II birthday escape room and projects for heredity!

I am a huge fan of project-based learning! As a result, I create lots of rubrics. Sometimes I write them myself and other times, I like to find premade ones to help me clarify the assessment piece. A co-worker in Colorado introduced me to Rubistar  years back. It's free and pretty user-friendly. They have several premade categories and criteria, but you can alter them to fit your needs. The website is old, but don't let that throw you off.

After months of work, I finally completed another lesson plan bundle with the idea of project-based learning and engineering in mind.  Check it out !

 I watched and was inspired the other day by The Creative Brain  on Netflix. There were so many tidbits on how to innovate and how all people can be creators. As a science teacher, I have been trying to encourage my students to create new inventions. Some takeaways I have to share with you are: 1. Create journals full of pictures and lists of things you come across every day. This could be done in a classroom between students to inspire one another or lists of phenomena. 2. Create a hybrid. Why not mesh two existing designs together to see what happens? 3. Make a twist.  We mistakenly think that things have to be brand new to be inventive. Take an existing invention and add a slight twist to it.

I used this to create class projects that students are assigned different pieces of a larger topic. This is an easy way to share out what they have found. It can easily be adapted to PowerPoint as well. I have a quick video with an example below.

Book Creator  is a free website for teachers to use with their students. Summary : Create digital books for projects by sharing a code to join the teacher's online library. Strengths: It's free and intuitive. Rarely did students have questions on how to use the website. Limitations : There are limited numbers of books that you can make. It was not enough for me to have  every student make a book. I offered it as an option to create projects. Set-up: 1. Sign in. 2. Share the code with students. Students will be prompted to choose a book format. From there, they can add pictures, text, and backgrounds.

I created lesson plans for the MS-LS1-3  on my Teachers Pay Teachers. I start the objective off with a couple phenomenon over things I think students will find to be crazy: regeneration and beating heart cells. My hope is that both will help students to make connections between cells and the body systems they create. The lesson plans continue on with a web quest (answer key is provided to teachers) to help students learn the terminology and examples of each of the levels of organization. Finally, there are two assessments to check student understanding. The first is called a critical thinking question. I ask an open-ended question that students can research. The question is not easy enough that they can simply Google the answer. They have to formulate a response based on what we learned in class and what they can find online.  The second assessment is a project completed over an assigned disease or disorder. Students find it fascinating to talk about what can go wrong w...