A five-week study taught students how to write a field guide that identified the plants in a small wooded area they passed through on their way to their school playground. By creating this authentic genre of science writing, students came to understand and care for the natural world in their immediate environment. They also developed important science, reading, and writing skills through purposeful work.
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The WebQuest is a four-step process integrated at appropriate points in the Animal Studies unit. Through the WebQuest, students create a series of habitat maps that build on the knowledge gained from conducting the various activities of the unit. The quest concludes with an evaluation using the WebQuest rubric and an oral presentation of a final collaborative map. In creating the hypothetical habitat, students analyze, evaluate, compare, and contrast each other’s work by making and justifying alternative choices.
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Science education must prepare students to make informed personal and political decisions. Many of those decisions will revolve around issues of the environment. We are drenched daily in reports about alarming environmental trends. The learning environments in these articles cover everything from rural Louisiana to New York City and parts in between. In each one there is a shared interest in educating students to be better stewards than recent generations have been. That’s a great and positive change, and we salute it. In this article, the field editor discusses the advantages of cultivating informed students who value the environment and their place within it.
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At the start of each school year at Oil City Elementary Magnet School in Oil City, Louisiana, eager students ask, “What’s our theme this year?” This curiosity comes from their expectations that they will study a different environmental concept each year. Kindergarten classes learn to “Be a Friend to the Earth,” followed by life cycles in the first grade, and continuing through forestry, aquaculture, horticulture, meteorology, and finally habitats in sixth grade. This environmental science focus has not only increased enrollment and produced dramatic increases in test scores but also brought national recognition to the school and staff.
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It’s no secret that many school programs don’t give children enough opportunity to explore the natural world—i.e., to “mess about” and to have firsthand experience with nature and animals. Not so at the Muscota New School in New York City! This innovative public elementary school actively promotes inquiry-based learning and encourages teachers to use creative methods in the classroom to help children study the natural world around them. In this article, we share the experience of a teacher and her students over the course of two years (kindergarten and first grade) as they explored nature through direct observation of animals in the classroom, child-centered inquiry science, and school-sponsored field trips. As the years progressed, so did students’ learning. Not only did students develop scientific literacy and communication skills, they also deepened their understanding of their environment.
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Teachers often use analogies and are unaware of it—they are using them automatically. Whenever they begin an explanation with “It’s just like…,” “It’s similar to…,” or “Think of it this way…,” they are using an analogy to explain a concept to their students. An analogy is a similarity between concepts. Analogies can help students build conceptual bridges between what is familiar and what is new. Often, new concepts represent complex, hard-to-visualize systems with interacting parts (e.g., a cell, an ecosystem, photosynthesis).
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Cognitive scientists (Donovan and Bransford 2005) conclude that when teachers “simply give students the knowledge to incorporate, the practice and skill development of doing one’s own mental search is shortchanged”, but when students engage in classroom talk, they “become better at monitoring and questioning their own thinking”. Science education researchers claim that elementary students have the ability to use science talk to explain, clarify, and justify what they have learned.
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Investigations with Wisconsin Fast Plants can make the subject matter come alive…or dead, depending on the experimental treatment. This became apparent when a university-based teacher educator and a fifth-grade teacher collaborated on a professional development experience aimed at increasing understanding of how science inquiry could be used effectively in diverse classrooms. This professional development experience centered on creating a unit for fifth-grade students as a part of a study of plant and animal cycles. While the unit included numerous activities, this article focuses on the inquiry portion of the study, as students investigated how pollutants might affect plants.
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Energy transformations are an important part of the functioning of ecosystems, and a key part of those energy transformations is photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, bacteria, and other organisms use the energy of sunlight to manufacture food in the form of sugar. If it weren’t for photosynthesis, the energy source (sunlight) for all ecosystems would be useless. In other words, we’d all die, even though we might have really nice tans.
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Stories about global warming and habitat loss are common news these days. Additionally, there are numerous reports about the loss of diversity among living things across the globe. These ideas and concepts are abstract and convoluted even for most adults to fully comprehend, especially when we consider the interdependence of life on Earth and the scale at which they occur. Children can begin to better comprehend the natural and human-influenced changes in environments by studying an ecosystem in miniature.
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In today’s electronic age of video games and mp3 players, children are not spending as much time outdoors as past generations did. Many fear that as a result children are becoming increasingly alienated from the natural world. This month’s trade book–inspired investigations encourage students to experience the excitement and mystery of their local ecosystems firsthand. In the process, they develop their skills of observation and learn to become better stewards of their environment.
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Community, assemblage, network, complex, interdependent, web, and synergism—definitions of an ecosystem often include these words to highlight the dynamic interrelated workings of plants and animals with their physical environment. Young children don’t understand the complexities of ecosystems, but they can begin to understand that only certain food sources meet the needs of an insect species, part of the National Science Education Content Standard C, Life Science, Characteristics of organisms, life cycles of organisms, and organisms and environments.
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Most children know they should not pollute but have never considered why. One elementary school teacher creates a lesson for third- through fifth-grade students that makes the connection concrete. In the lesson, students consider the possible effects a trash item would have on an animal and its habitat, identifying ways in which the piece of trash could be helpful or harmful to the animal and its habitat and then communicating their ideas about how people can clean a polluted environment to make it safe for animals. Along the way, students use reading skills to gather information about the animal and its habitat, writing skills to record their ideas on paper, and speaking skills to share their ideas about their animal and piece of trash with the class. Technology can also be integrated if the teacher chooses to use websites for the reading portion of the activity.
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