Nerdy Book Club: Using Picture Books to Introduce New Units

If you don't follow Nerdy Book Club, you should. You'll find more than 70 bloggers there, so you'll be able to hop right over to their blogs to see which of them will be invaluable to you!

The post I'm featuring today is Top Ten Picture Books To Introduce Units Of Study, by Kari Allen. In it, Kari describes how she used ten favorite books to introduce math, science, and other units to her second graders. Here's an example:

 

Library Mouse written and illustrated by Daniel Kirk

She says, "...it was the foundation for our writing (which we did in all subjects.) I started the year off by sharing this book with students." The next day "students would discover tons of stapled blank books that the Library Mouse left," and thus began their "yearlong (hopefully lifelong) inquiry into writing."

I've long believed, that with the emphasis on reading and math that new standards have required, science and social studies could best be taught by using integrated units. How better to do this than to use books and stories to teach both reading and content?

Enjoy Kari's ideas, and may they lead to many more of your own!

An Excellent Find: E is for Explore!

You are going to LOVE the site I have to share with you tonight! I came across it via a science activity posted to Pinterest, and was I ever amazed and delighted when I followed the link to Erin Bittman's blog, E is for Explore!

Erin blends graphic design, her original career, with her current path toward becoming a teacher, to "develop unique learning activities, search the internet and compile additional great ideas from other sources." Her site is chock-full of manipulatives and activities useful across the curriculum, from literacy to math and engineering, and she provides easy links to sites that she shares.

Since Easter is coming soon, I'll show you images from one of Erin's posts, wherein she shares activities from inferencing to fractions using Plastic Eggs: 

Great, huh? Click on over to Erin's blog, where "all 'E is for Explore' activities conform to state common core curriculum standards."

And you're welcome! :-)

Building Academic Vocabulary

I just might have mentioned before that I love Ireland's NBSS site. There are actually many reasons to love it, but as a teacher, I especially love two things. One is the organization's understanding that academics and behavior are tightly interwoven. The second is that it provides truly great teaching strategies; not only are students' needs considered, but teacher support is also a focus.

Today we'll look at their collection of Academic Vocabulary Building Activities & Strategies. Every teacher knows that a student must be able to understand and use the vocabulary of learning in order to succeed in any content area. Our students need a deep knowledge of these words in order to "access information about them from memory as they read" and we must explicitly teach both academic words and strategies for learning new ones that they encounter.

You will appreciate the explanation of Robert Marzano's six steps to effective vocabulary instruction, and the suggested methods of implementing each one: 

• The teacher gives a friendly, informal description, explanation or example of the new vocabulary term.
• Students give a description, explanation or example of the new term in his/her own words.
• Students create a non linguistic representation of the word.
• Students engage in activities to deepen their knowledge of the new word. 
• Students discuss the new word with one another.
• Students play games to reinforce and review new vocabulary. 

You'll love even more the thirty-three vocabulary Graphic Organizers provided for your students with so many different activities that they'll never get tired of them! Here's a sneak peek of some of my favorites:

   

NBSS provides links to six Useful Websites for Vocabulary Activities such as Visuwords and Triptico, that have fabulous vocabulary activities for your kiddos.

      

Last, but certainly not least, are Games for Learning. From Charades to Pictionary to Taboo to Wordo, you'll find instructions, templates, and links to sites that allow you to create your own puzzles tailored to your students' needs.

Convinced? I thought you would be. Enjoy this great resource and see how much difference it can make for your students' essential academic vocabularies!

Cures for the Common Core Blues: BOOKS, Vol. 5

I'm a bit behind on this series because our son, daughter-in-law, and grandbabies who live in Tanzania arrived in the states last week for a visit. Oh, and we had a booth selling crafts made there by Holly and her Tanzanian friend Suzy at the local Arts and Craft Fair for three days...a busy and joyful week!

Today I want to share a book by one of my favorite authors, Leo Lionni. Having taught high school for 25 years, I came late to his wonderful writing, learning to love it during the 7 years I taught elementary ESL. 

Inch by Inch was the first of Lionni's books to win the Caldecott Honor, with three more following. It's a fantastic book for integrating measurement skills; Scholastic has a lesson plan on this page. Not only is the prose wonderful; his illustrations are as well. The iconic Horn Book Magazine praises the book's “...lovely colors...sharp definition of cutouts against white space...rhythm of the composition...simplicity of the whole...” 

Weston Woods produced an animated version of the book in 2006, which costs $59.95, but ArtsEdge has a story performance, by Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia, online and FREE!

You and your young friends can read more about Leo on Random House's website, which provides tons of information for an author study - seven short chapters and an essay written by his granddaughter Annie Lionni. Your students can also 

• watch him explain why he writes books about animals in a short video,
• see how he makes a paper mouse(and try one themselves) here,
• learn about his childhood and his imagination in this video,
• see many pictures, including one of him playing his accordion!

I have other favorite Lionni books (he wrote 40!) that I'll share later, but in the meantime, please let Inch by Inch and Leo's personal story help cure your Common Core blues.

I hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving week; many blessings from my family to yours! 

New Discovery: Teacher Support Force

Thanks to Pinterest and my friend Melissa McCormick Roysdon, a Tennessee ESL teacher in DeKalb County, I have a wonderful new discovery to share with you!

Pat Jones, a teacher for almost 30 years in Georgia & North Carolina, writes a blog that is part of an amazing website called Teacher Support Force.

LET THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

The site is divided into sections: 

• Aesthetics, which includes strategies using drama, art, dance, and music
• Learning Environment, including cooperative learning, creative grouping, motivation, time management, and lowering stress
• Reading, with coordination, vocabulary, Dolch sight words, reading fluency, and comprehension sections
• Math, addressing the language of math, math word walls and centers, math and art, engaging the senses, and integer rules
• Games & Strategies, including word walls, focus games, memory activities, and free games
• The Early Years, featuring early childhood, parents, car games, benefits of play, reading together, and focus problems

The "pin" that grabbed my attention and took me to Pat's site was this one:

Citing the brain research of Dr. Fritz Mengert, she explains using a red dot in the center of a word to help kids focus on the middle of a word and not just the beginning (to stop guessing), as well as Using a Red Dot to Improve Fluency. 

I'll be letting Pat know that I linked to her site today; I can't wait to share it with the teachers at the school where I'm working as an Academic Specialist. I hope you'll find the site useful and that you'll let her know if you do! 

Cures For The Common Core Blues: BOOKS, Vol. 3

What a book I have for you today! My Name is María Isabel has been on my short list of fantastic children's books for several years.

Publishers Weekly describes Alma Flor Ada's beautifully written chapter book this way: "Armed with her new blue book­bag, María Isabel bravely faces her first day at a new school. But when she meets her new teacher, she is told there are already two other Marías in the class. 'Why don’t we call you Mary instead?' her teacher sug­gests, unaware that María was named for both her grand­moth­ers, a grand­fa­ther and her father. María's inabil­ity to respond to 'Mary' leads to more prob­lems. Sim­ply told, this story com­bines the strug­gle of a Puerto Rican family’s efforts to improve their life with a shared sense of pride in their her­itage. The author’s care­fully drawn char­ac­ter­i­za­tions avoid stereo­types, thus increas­ing their appeal and believ­abil­ity. An essay involv­ing a wish list gives María a chance to reclaim her name, and allows her teacher to make amends."

Reading is Fundamental has several excellent activities for the book that you can adapt and make your own:

• A guide for educators that includes a prediction chart template.
• A tic-tac-toe of activity options, with math, science, geography, art, and writing extensions for the book. I LOVE these!!!
• A guide for parents and families that includes a recipe for beans and rice.

You and your kiddos can read Alma Flor Ada's biography and watch a video interview with her over at Colorín Colorado, a fabulous site worthy of its own post, and soon!

When I read My Name is María Isabel with a group of 4th graders several years ago, I asked them to write an essay about their "Greatest Wish" as María did; one of them brought me to tears. My sweet student wrote about how much she wanted to see her sister who lives in Mexico with their grandmother, and whom she hasn't seen since she was two years old. What a heartfelt, and mature, wish from a precious little girl! 

(Note: one of the activities suggested by Reading is Fundamental is writing just such an essay.)

Enjoy this wonderful book, available at Amazon, with your kiddos! Teach them the important vocabulary -  attentively, Hanukkah, manger, menorah, misunderstanding, pageant, strumming, Three Kings' Day, troublesome. Discuss the realistic fiction genre. Have them write, look for evidence and cite it, learn about measurement using the recipe, and much more.

And as always, let it help cure your Common Core blues!

Illustrative Mathematics - More Resources for the Common Core

Today's very cool math resource for the Common Core State Standards is Illustrative Mathematics.

Illustrative Mathematics is an initiative of the Institute for Mathematics & Education at the University of Arizona. The website launch team is headed by Bill McCallum, lead author of the CCSS in math, who also writes the blog Tools for the Common Core Standards.

Why very cool? There are more than 400 illustrative tasks for the Common Core on the site, all FREE! 

Since I know very well how busy teachers are, I want to show you that this site is worth exploring. Below, I have copied and pasted just one of the tasks for Grade 5, so that you can see the task itself, read the provided commentary, and explore the two proposed solutions:

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5.NF Painting a Wall

Alignment 1:  5.NF.B

Grade   5

Domain   NF: Number and Operations---Fractions

Cluster   Apply and extend previous understandings of multiplication and division to 

                 multiply and divide fractions.

                                   

Nicolas is helping to paint a wall at a park near his house as part of a community service project. He had painted half of the wall yellow when the park director walked by and said,
"This wall is supposed to be painted red."

Nicolas immediately started painting over the yellow portion of the wall. By the end of the day, he had repainted 5/6 of the yellow portion red.

What fraction of the entire wall is painted red at the end of the day?

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Commentary: The purpose of this task is for students to find the answer to a question in context that can be represented by fraction multiplication. This task is appropriate for either instruction or assessment depending on how it is used and where students are in their understanding of fraction multiplication. If used in instruction, it can provide a lead-in to the meaning of fraction multiplication. If used for assessment, it can help teachers see whether students readily see that this is can be solved by multiplying 5/6×1/2 or not, which can help diagnose their comfort level with the meaning of fraction multiplication.

The teacher might need to emphasize that the task is asking for what portion of the total wall is red, it is not asking what portion of the yellow has been repainted.

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Solution: Solution 1

In order to see what fraction of the wall is red we need to find out what 5/6 of 1/2 is. To do this we can multiply the fractions together like so:

5/6×1/2=(5×1)/(6×2)=5/12

So we can see that 5/12 of the wall is red.

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Solution: Solution 2

The solution can also be represented with pictures. Here we see the wall right before the park director walks by:


And now we can break up the yellow portion into 6 equally sized parts:



Now we can show what the wall looked like at the end of the day by shading 5 out of those 6 parts red.


And finally, we can see that if we had broken up the wall into 12 equally sized pieces from the beginning, that finding the fraction of the wall that is red would be just a matter of counting the number of red pieces and comparing them to the total.


And so, since 5 pieces of the total 12 are red, we can see that 5/12 of the wall is red at the end of the day.

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Go over to Illustrative Mathematics, and look at the Illustrations for the K-8 Content Standards and the High School Content Standards. I think you will be impressed and agree that they are indeed very cool!

Wonderopolis®

Wonderopolis is a program from the National Center for Family Literacy. Its Wonders of the Day highlight learning moments in everyday life, and are intended for families to watch together, so they can learn together.

You can browse the Wonders Archives in 86 categories, including:

• Animals (ex: Do Warthogs Really Have Warts?) 
• Cultures of the World (ex: Have You Ever Tried Dim Sum?)
• Folk Tales and Legends (ex: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?)
• Invention (ex: How Do Night Vision Goggles Work?)
• Professions (ex: How Do Teachers Get to Be So Smart?)
• Writing (ex:Celebrating Poetry Friday)

Posts of special interest to teachers? Try Connecting Wonderopolis to Content Areas, How to Integrate Wonderopolis into Reading Workshop, and Wonderopolis is WONDERful Science HW for ideas on using the site with your classes.

I'm sure you'll find something, or many things, to like at Wonderopolis, "where the wonders of learning never cease."

Inside Mathematics - Resources for the Common Core

Inside Mathematics provides a way for educators to share strong practices via:

• tested demonstration lessons
• guided tours of reflective mathematics practice
• tools & resources to support daily practice
• a professional learning community

The great (and amazing) thing about this project is that it doesn't just talk about the CCSS, it actually provides performance tasks and assessment resources that are aligned to the standards. AND they can be searched by either grade level or mathematical progression.

Here's an example for 2nd Grade - Incredible Equations:

"The task challenges a student to demonstrate understanding of concepts involved in addition and subtraction. A student must be able to understand addition and subtraction as inverse operations and apply this understanding to problems where the unknown is in different positions...must make sense of the equals sign as a balance point between the two sides of an equation in order to find a missing addend on one side of an equation...must be able to justify a solution."

Common Core State Standards Math - Content:

Operations and Algebraic Thinking
2.OA.1 Represent and solve problems involving addition and subtraction.
2.OA.2 Add and subtract within 20.

Common Core State Standards Math – Standards of Mathematical Practice:

MP.1 Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
MP.3 Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

Included are the task itself, which consists of eight addition and subtraction equations with one number missing, and a task rubric.

The MOST valuable part of this piece? An extremely detailed evaluation and reflection guide, including examples of student work. Identified are 

• what students knew and were able to do
• areas of difficulty for the students
• strategies used by successful students
• a frequency distribution for the example students
• a table of understandings and misunderstandings for each equation arrangement
• the Implications for Instruction and Action Research in narrative form

What a fabulous tool for reflective practice! Click over to the site and look at all of the excellent performance tasks available there for FREE.

Library of Congress - Resources for the Common Core

 

The Library of Congress is a truly amazing resource for teachers, with collections that boggle the mind. Click on Digital Collections and have a look!

I'll write about various collections and their usefulness for you later, but today's post is about the Teaching with Primary Sources Program at the Library, and specifically, the current issue of The Teaching with Primary Sources Journal: Primary Sources and the Common Core State Standards, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 2012. You can download the entire journal in PDF and print it if you would like to have a hard copy.

Rich Cairn's feature article, Primary Sources: At the Heart of the Common Core State Standards, describes what using primary sources to achieve the CCSS looks like in practice. It concludes: "Primary sources can provide the raw materials teachers need to support student achievement in the CCSS. Primary source-based learning is at the heart of the standards. Using photographs, maps, manuscripts, and other primary sources to engage students in learning and building critical thinking and constructing knowledge will help prepare students for success in school and beyond."

The issue includes links to Research and Current Thinking and a Teacher Spotlight, both important and read-worthy. Perhaps the most useful, however, are two complete Learning Activities:

• Determining Point of View: Paul Revere and the Boston Massacre is suggested for 5th and 6th grades. The CCSS targeted are RI.5.6., RI.6.6., RI.6.7., and RI.6.8. Download the entire activity here.
• Teaching Speaking & Listening Skills with Primary Sources is recommended for grades 9 though 12 and targets the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Speaking and Listening. Download it in its entirety here.

If you'd like to view previous issues of the TPS Journal, which was formerly known as the Teaching with Primary Sources Quarterly, go to the archive page. These are devoted to topics such as Critical Thinking, Differentiated Instruction, English Language Learners, Inquiry Learning, Literacy Integration, Project-Based Learning, and Science. 

What fantastic resources, for you and your implementation of the Common Core. Hurry over to see what you can use!

Weekly Common Core Practice Prompts at The New York Times

Four days ago, The Learning Network at The New York Times announced what they are calling an experiment: "Beginning Sept. 21, each Friday you’ll find three quick, classroom-tested tasks that ask students to do Common Core-focused work with that week’s Times."

The picture below shows teachers Jonathan Olsen and Sarah Gross, with their freshman humanities classes at High Technology High School in Lincroft, N.J. According to TLN blogger Katherine Schulten, Jonathan and Sarah, who co-teach history and English, last year began creating "short daily reading and writing prompts for their students to use with that day’s Times." 

In June, Sarah wrote in her blog The Reading Zone about TLN's Summer Reading Contest, saying that she and Jonathan believed that using The Times in their classes had "revolutionized" the way they taught.

"By reading the newspaper daily and writing in response to the paper’s content, our students greatly improved both their critical thinking and writing ability. Using The Times to teach history and literacy this past year forever changed our approach to education. We are now able to meet all Common Core State Standards for writing and reading informational text, while preserving the literature curriculum already studied in English class. As a result of our daily inclusion of The Times, our redesigned classroom is now filled with topical writing, lively debate and students making connections between what they are learning in their classrooms (and) what is happening throughout the world around them."

Starting next week, Sarah and Jonathan will send the prompts they create, and that they and their students believe worked best, to TLN bloggers, former teachers themselves, who will "add some scaffolding or other kinds of small changes to help make the questions more accessible for a range of learners."

The plan is that each Friday, you will find at least one of the prompts aligned to the Common Core standards for reading and writing about informational text appropriate to use with YOUR students. Please try them, and let the writers at The Times (and me) know how it goes!

Science NetLinks - Lessons for the Common Core

Science Netlinks is a project of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Like EDSITEment!, it is a member of the Thinkfinity Consortium. You can find plenty of good information and links galore here. Unfortunately, I didn't find that the lessons and activities supported a high level of inquiry. Most were didactic, though thorough.  

I am, however, excited that one of the lessons led me to a real discovery: the work of Vicki Cobb, the Education World Science Editor. You can read her philosophy of teaching science and find her Show-Biz Science activities archive on EW's website. They are great!

Vicki is the winner of the 2012 AAAS/Subaru Science Books and Films’s Lifetime Achievement Award for more than 85 nonfiction books for children. Her books would be wonderful to add to your classroom library, in light of the emphasis on reading informational text in addition to literature in the CCSS. The added benefit? Many are books that contain embedded investigations for your kiddos to carry out.

BTW, the SB&F Best Books of 2011 special issue is available for download for a limited time with full text of reviews. Included in this guide are all of the finalists and winners of the 2012 AAAS/Subaru Book Prizes - great guidance for books to use DURING your reading/language block for both science and reading instruction!

I also discovered a link to more than thirty first-person accounts of the 1906 Fan Francisco Earthquake and Fire, located at the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco. These accounts would be perfect primary sources to use for developing close reading skills as per the CCSS.

The Science NetLinks site is divided into five sections:

• Afterschool - informal, often hands-on, science activities. Each one includes a facilitator page, as well as online and printable pages for kids. 
• Collections - groupings of lessons, tools, Science Updates, and other resources relating to a single topic
• Lessons - can be filtered and searched by grade and theme: astronomy, biology, careers, chemistry, earth science, engineering, health/medicine, math/statistics, nature of science, physics, social sciences, and technology
• Science News - up-to-date science Facts, Updates, and Educator Blog. Includes a monthly newsletter. 
• Tools - provide descriptions of online resources in four categories—hands-on activities, interactives, teaching aids, and websites— with tips to integrate them into your classroom.

I urge you to go look around. You will, no doubt, discover other gems available to help you align your teaching of science with inquiry and with the literacy goals of the Common Core.

The Common Core - Fine Arts Connection

"I will let you in on a secret: CCSS presents a teaching philosophy closely aligned with most fine arts classrooms. The methods of CCSS rely on teachers working as facilitators as opposed to lecturers, stress the value of modeling over telling, and emphasizes valuable learning occurs when subjects are interrelated and meaningful connections are made."

Amen, Amy Johnson!

Amy teaches in Austell, GA, and blogs at Artful Artsy Amy. Today, I want to point you to her post on the Arts Education section of ARTSblog: Common Core Collaboration Key for Fine Arts and Classroom Teachers. 

Here's a shot of Amy's classroom, with her students engaged in, yes, collaborative learning:

I'm SO impressed at the way Amy and the teachers at her middle school have collaborated to create meaningful cross-curricular connections! She offers an editable collaborative framework for FREE, and provides this example of her work with a seventh grade Math teacher for a unit on tessellations:

Amy says, "Instead of demanding core subject teachers to make connections to the arts, we should ask them to share their units and work together to make meaningful connections. In this manner, both teachers are able to rely on their strengths."

Again, amen!

Amy is only one contributor to the conversation about arts education and the common core on ARTSblog. I found fifteen posts in the past five days (National Arts in Education Week) that discuss many aspects of the impact each has on the other. Please look them over and check out the links each provides. Some are cautionary, but others provide concrete curriculum links that you can use in your classroom, whether you teach art or a core subject.

A great example: Lynne Munson, in her post How Vincent van Gogh Can Help You Teach to the Common Core Standards, says that "the CCSS present an exciting opportunity for elementary school teachers (who teach all subjects), grades 6-12 ELA teachers, and arts teachers to utilize the arts to teach the literacy skills outlined by the new standards." She links to The Arts and the Common Core Curriculum Mapping Project and its 179 arts activities.

You can also follow the related Twitter discussion. (And if you're a Twitter newbie, here's a great intro from Allison Boyer’s article on Blog World: A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter Basics)

If you fear, as I do, the loss of funding for arts education with a misguided implementation of the CCSS, you can demonstrate its necessity by developing a robust collaboration in your school. Here's to your efforts, and to your enjoyment of connecting and collaborating!

UPDATE: Please go to The Common Core - Fine Arts (AND Science, History, & Geography) Connection - Part 2 for more information.

Hispanic Heritage Month - Resources for Every Content Area

Hispanic Heritage Month is September 15 - October 15, and the resources available for you to integrate its celebration into your curriculum are MANY!

The official web portal for the month-long observance is a collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The site is chock-full of links to Exhibits and Collections in these categories:

                

                        

           Art and Architecture                         The Era of Exploration                           Culture and Ethnography

                              

                           Economics                                      Government, Politics, and Law            Poetry and Literature

  

                                                          History                                                                          Music

Are you a science teacher? Here's a great site for you: Latinos in Math & Science: Resources for kids, young adults and teachers. Check out the hotlinks for biographies of Hispanic scientists, etc.

Do you teach math? Go to the Smithsonian's Hispanic Heritage Cultural Tour and choose Resources. Select NMAH’s “Sports: Breaking Records, Breaking Barriers” website article on Roberto Clemente as a "hook" for a lesson on mean, median, mode, and range. Or graph his hits over a span of years. Or...

The Smithsonian's HHCT is amazing in so many other ways. Click over and check out all of the Objects, the Timeline, and the Quizzes and Activities there. 

Enjoy all the possibilities of the next month. November is American Indian Heritage Month, so I'll be searching out good resources for your observance of the First People's heritage!

Teaching Science Through Inquiry - Last in the Series

If you teach science and are just now joining the blog, PLEASE go back and read these August 20th & 21st posts before reading this one - A Private Universe - It will change your life! (be SURE to watch the video) and A Private Universe - Second in a Series.

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Here's the thing, and oh, my goodness, do you hear Common Core goals of rigor and relevance in every phrase?

"Students at all grade levels and in every domain of science should have the opportunity to use scientific inquiry and develop the ability to think and act in ways associated with inquiry, including asking questions, planning and conducting investigations, using appropriate tools and techniques to gather data, thinking critically and logically about relationships between evidence and explanations, constructing and analyzing alternative explanations, and communicating scientific arguments." 

From the National Science Education Standards

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As promised, in this final post connected to A Private Universe, here is an annotated list of fabulous resources for teaching kids through inquiry:

1. Education.com is dedicated to parents, but who says teachers aren't parents (and parents teachers)? Many of the ideas on the site would be great in a classroom. There are 626 activities and hundreds of ideas for science fair projects, but again, who says they only belong in science fairs?

2. To Exploratorium, I say (with a smile): "There's NO reason these After School Activities have to be done after school!" 

3. Exploratorium's Explore tab takes you to 528 things to make and do, and links to 152 science learning websites!

4. How to Smile is the project of a group of science museums: Lawrence Hall of Science, Exploratorium, New York Hall of Science, Science Museum of Minnesota, and Children's Museum of Houston. Their focus is on science for children in non-classroom settings. I call that a challenge that teachers can meet with non-traditional equipment!!! There are 3,287 math and science activities on this site...need we say more?

5. Inquiry in Action  - The American Chemical Society offers a FREE download of the book Inquiry in Action. It has 7 chapters with 43 hands-on activities PLUS a review of Chemistry Fundamentals with molecular animations for teachers (we all need a refresher from time to time)!

6. The Inquiry Project "takes a unique approach to a study of matter for grades 3-5, bringing together mathematics, science content, and inquiry." The entire curriculum is presented on the website. You can purchase some investigation kits from Sempco, Inc., but most of the items needed can be found easily, and detailed specs for developing your own kits are coming soon. In the Library of Resources, there are very short videos that explain ideas and strategies that will hone YOUR skills in teaching with inquiry. This site is a treasure!

7. Science Buddies has more than 1000 Project Ideas focused on science fairs, but who says that's their only place? While these are not open-ended, there is a "Make it Your Own" section for each that could lead to a higher level of inquiry.

8. The Science Museum was founded in 1857 as part of the South Kensington Museum in the U.K., and gained independence in 1909. Most of us can't take a field trip there, but we can make use of their great Classroom Resources.

9. 24/7 Science is a product of The Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. It is simply fantastic. Go. Click on the array of resources. Please. You and your kiddos will be glad.

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If, as I hope, you are seeking to raise the level of inquiry in YOUR science class, I highly recommend Simpifying Inquiry Instruction, by Bell, Smetana, and Binns, an article that appeared in The Science Teacher. You will find there a modified version of the four-level model of inquiry, with suggestions for raising the level of a science activity. It is a valuable tool! 

And because I MUST make a reading connection :) - I know that time is at a premium in your classrooms. With that in mind, please consider using some of your reading/language arts block (which, with the implementation of CCSS, must include a large amount of informational text) to integrate science, which should not be left by the wayside!  NSTA, the National Science Teachers Association, has done the research for you. They have, for the past 11 years, compiled lists of Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K–12. Could you ask for more?

              

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One final note: Please consider joining your state Science Teachers Association, if you haven't already. I was a member of TSTA for years as a science teacher, and I can attest that their annual conference is a wonderful professional development experience. This year's theme is Framing the Common Core. You will make friends and professional connections, and have great resources at your fingertips. Here's an example: an air pressure lesson posted on the website by my friend, Barry Farris. 

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 P.S. I hope you're all enjoying your long weekend! I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a relaxing beach trip with 5 of my best girlfriends (one of whom is my only sister, Carole). I may not be posting again until I return, which is why I wanted to get this looong one up before I left. Happy September!