Sponsored by NASA and the JASON Education Foundation, the remote Sensing Earth Science Teacher Education Program (RSESTeP) trains teachers to use state-of-the art remote-sensing technology with the idea that participants bring back what they learn and incorporate it into Earth science lessons using technology. The author’s participation in the program created an opportunity for her fifth-grade students to learn about local wetlands using data and images from space. Students used authentic scientific methods to answer their own questions about the specific environment in which they live. This exciting, remote-sensing mission is described here.
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As the authors approached a unit on magnets with their first-grade students, they decided to incorporate more inquiry into their district’s learning module, Magnets: Elementary Science and Technology Module for Primary Grades (State College Area School District 1993). By restructuring their lessons, using science talks, and listening carefully to their students, they were able to transform students’ surprises and wonderings into testable questions and meet district learning objectives. As a result, the unit had a magnetic effect on students, allowing them to use scientific inquiry to think and act like real scientists.
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Elementary teachers of science are at a great advantage because observation—collecting information about the world using our five senses—and classification—sorting things by properties—come so naturally to children. Buttons are ideal objects when teaching children about properties and classification. These familiar and inexpensive objects provide a meaningful teaching tool in the classroom.
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Properties are “hot,” not in terms of real estate but in science class. Here, the editor highlights the feature articles related to this month’s theme, Properties of Objects and Materials. With these articles as a guide, you can move students toward a deeper understanding of property. As you do so, they will build a strong foundation for future science learning.
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This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer.
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Formative assessment probes can be effective tools to help teachers build a bridge between students’ initial ideas and scientific ones. In this article, the authors describe how using two formative assessment probes can help teachers determine the extent to which students make similar connections between developing a concept of matter and a concept of rocks. Both probes require students to consider the properties of size, weight, shape, texture, or form in developing a concept of “matter” or “rock.”
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As part of the SMATHematics Project: The Wonder of Science, The Power of Mathematics—a collaborative partnership between Kennesaw State University and two local school districts, fifth graders had the opportunity to puzzle out chemical formulas of propane, methanol, and other important molecules. In addition, they explored properties that characterize certain molecules and then used their newly acquired knowledge of atoms’ bonding requirements to help them build three-dimensional molecular models. The effort is succeeding—as you can see by the fifth-grade classroom experience described here.
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Many teachers and students have experienced the classic pet rock experiment in conjunction with a geology unit. A teacher has students bring in a “pet” rock found outside of school, and the students run geologic tests on the rock. The tests include determining relative hardness using Mohs scale, checking for magnetization, and assessing luster. While this type of lesson is concise and direct, the authors have found a new way of targeting the same Earth science benchmarks for upper elementary students. Their inquiry-based approach allows students to discover geologic properties as they befriend their pet rocks.
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We often think of science as exploration and experiment. However, classrooms that portray only this view of science fail to capture an essential feature of science—evidence-based explanation. When scientists encounter patterns in the world, they construct theories to explain them. This article describes how teachers can build a classroom atmosphere for developing explanations, and includes research results indicating that elementary students can generate viable explanations using scientific evidence.
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Each year, in thousands of classrooms across the country, students classify animals, rocks, and other things as part of their science studies. Each year, thousands of students no doubt ask, “Why in the heck are we doing this?” Classifying things according to their properties and characteristics is a big part of science, but what’s the purpose? Why do it in science class, and why do scientists do it as part of their work? Discover the answers to these questions in this month’s column.
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Children need to explore as many different materials as possible in order to make sense of their world. Understanding how materials behave in their natural state and under certain conditions will help them understand why objects are made of specific materials. In the following lesson, students compare the elasticity of various materials by stretching the materials and measuring the new length. By paying attention to how items react to stress, children build a foundation for more complex topics of molecular properties of matter and structural design.
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Give a child a hand lens or a microscope and they quickly become fascinated with the hidden worlds these tools reveal. The lessons in this month’s column provide opportunities for students to take a closer look at the properties of objects and organisms and explore how magnifying instruments help scientists make observations and discoveries.
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From Scooby Doo and Nancy Drew to the countless other detectives that fill children’s bookshelves and television programs, it is clear that children are fascinated with solving crimes. As a result, a chemistry professor who performs outreach activities at local elementary schools exploited this interest in mysteries as a method to spark curiosity in science. This was accomplished through the development of an outreach activity in which students solve a mystery using density and fingerprint analysis.
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Children learn about properties of materials as they walk through a fabric store, help in the kitchen, or dig in the garden. Directed explorations in the classroom build on these early experiences. In the inquiry-based activity described here, students prepare to learn about wet and dry ingredients (liquids and solids) and how they mix together by exploring small amounts of substances and how to follow a procedure—something scientists do as they try to duplicate the results of an initial experiment.
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