As a new science teacher, your first year of teaching is well underway. You’ve been facing the challenges that all new teachers face—learning your students’ names, how to manage your classroom, the best ways to engage your students, and how to account to your administrators for all that you do. But science teachers face other challenges, such as additional safety requirements, particular grading difficulties, budget restrictions, and how to incorporate science into an already crowded curriculum.
The New Science Teacher’s Handbook: What You Didn’t Learn From Student Teaching may be just the lifeline you need to keep your first teaching experience a positive one. Written by Sarah Reeves Young and Mike Roberts, using their actual classroom experiences as examples, this handbook tells you what you need to know that you didn’t learn in your preservice training.
Each chapter presents scenarios and time-tested ideas from both within and outside the classroom. The authors explain the setup for each chapter:

The Story: These are actual experiences that happened within either Sarah’s or Mike’s classroom. Any “I” statements are in reference to what happened to us individually within our classrooms. As a new teacher, it’s always nice to know that someone else has had a similar struggle. These true stories demonstrate that even those who go on to write books on best practices in the classroom didn’t start off as perfect educators.
The Moral: What we learned from the aforementioned story. Similar to a fable, there is a moral to each story that addresses the theme of the struggle and sets the stage for moving beyond the challenge.
Steps for Success: Here we present strategies to help teachers overcome situations similar to those presented in “the story.” There are multiple solutions presented so teachers can choose those that work best for their specific concerns and school environment.
What Does Success Look Like: This section examines how the classroom looks after implementing the “steps for success.” This is the “light at the end of the tunnel” to help new teachers see that common challenges can end with positive results that benefit both teacher and students.
Resources: Here we present resources to consider for additional support in organizing the classroom for those teachers who want to explore the topic in more detail.

Whether you are on your way to becoming a new science teacher or a teacher in the early years of your career, we feel confident that the ideas presented here will help you become the teacher you’ve always wanted to be.
To learn more, check out the sample chapter: “Starting Class the Right Way: Starter Activities.” This book is also available as an e-book.
An additional NSTA Press resources to help you as you get started in your science teaching career is Rise and Shine: A Practical Guide for the Beginning Science Teacher.

Our parents’ association is giving mini-grants to each teacher. This is only my second year teaching at the elementary level, so I still need lots of stuff for my classroom. I’d like to spend the funds on science-related materials. Any suggestions on what I should buy?
—Darin, Savannah, Georgia
Although it’s tempting to use the funds for classroom supplies or posters and decorations, I’m glad you’re thinking about science! Some basic materials can go a long way in providing opportunities for young students to explore and investigate.
First of all, look at your school’s science curriculum for your grade level and your lesson plans from last year. Were there activities you couldn’t do because you didn’t have the materials? Refer to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for elementary students and consider how the performance expectations (and the practices, core ideas, and crosscutting concepts they were developed from) could be addressed through student investigations. Materials for these activities could be a good start for your shopping list.
Do you have protective eyewear and other basic safety equipment? If not, put these on the list. Did you use science kits last year? You may need to replenish the consumable materials this year. Perhaps you and your colleagues could pool your mini-grants for larger-ticket items to share among your classrooms.
I have several colleagues who were elementary science specialists. Based on what I saw in their classrooms, you could begin to develop an inventory of simple materials used for a variety of activities:

• Building blocks in different sizes and shapes
• Magnets
• Hand lenses
• Calculators
• Metric rulers and plastic measuring cups
• Easy-to-read thermometers
• Science-related books at a variety of reading levels for your classroom library
• Maps of your state, the United States, and the world
• A class set of small white boards and markers for students to display their work
• Shallow trays
• Animal specimens sealed in clear plastic blocks (e.g., insects, worms, small skeletons)

Consider what you might need for student projects:

• Materials for investigating plant growth in a classroom garden (even a window ledge can be a garden): small pots, plants, potting soil, a grow light
• Binoculars and field guides to use on class field trips
• Science notebooks for student journaling, sketching, and recording data
• Materials for composting or recycling projects
• Weather stations
• A small aquarium

If you have access to tablets, their cameras can be turned into microscopes, or you could purchase apps that relate to your learning goals or enhance student creativity. Students could use a digital camera to document and share their activities.
Storage space is a concern in many classrooms. You could include containers for storing materials or trays and small boxes to organize materials for the lab groups.
Browse through the articles in Science & Children for more activities (and what you would need) that fit with your learning goals and students’ interests.
During the school year, share what you and your students are doing with the materials with the parents’ organization. They’ll appreciate seeing pictures or videos of students at work. You could also ask students to write thank-you notes or create presentations explaining what they’re learning in science as a result of their gift.
And once you’ve used these funds, start a list for next year!
 
Photo: http://tinyurl.com/kf8d74l
 

The first week of school is when we begin to know our students and make observations about their skills, personalities and interests. I was surprised by the abilities of this year’s two-year-old class, but I shouldn’t have been. Even though just a year ago they were babies coming with a parent to pick up their older siblings at the end of the school day, it was almost half their lifetime ago. They have grown much in that year and know and do so much! Some tell a detailed story about a summer experience, are experts about trains, zip through the single piece puzzles, dig deeply in the sand, jump with two feet, use the “potty”, share a toy with a friend, turn the book pages by themselves, pass the paint brush to a classmate waiting at the easel, and wipe their mouth after snack.
Sensory experiences engage them and introduce materials from the natural world—rough and smooth pieces of tree bark, fuzzy and smooth leaves, big and small leaves, leaves with a strong smell, dry and wet sand, sea shells and water in jars and tubs. The hard objects should be too large to choke on, and the softer ones, like leaves, need adult supervision to remind the children to keep them out of their mouths. What sensory experiences do your children have with natural materials? How does experiencing the natural world fit in with your local, state or national standards?
Outside there are many more natural sights, smells, sounds and textures to experience. By making contact with natural materials a daily experience, children will soon be experts in their local nature. It does take additional time to wash hands, dump sand out of shoes and change into dry clothes. This extra time must be acknowledged and supported by the program administrators and the families. Finger plays, story-telling, conversation and songs can make the clothes-changing clean-up time rich with language and caring.

Many of us remember building models in school—replicas of the solar system, atomic structure, or the double helix of DNA. But in the era of the Next Generation Science Standards, models should not just be built as an arts-and-crafts activity, but as a way to explore and explain phenomena. If this is a new idea for you and your students, the authors of the featured articles in this month’s issue provide strategies that illustrate these modeling experiences.
Developing and Using Models in Physics has examples of students’ models and suggestions you can use in any class. You’ll notice that some are paper-and-pencil diagrams and explanations. The topics include electrostatics, forces and rockets, and buoyant forces. The authors note that “Rather than using trial and error, students were asked to create models of variables that they thought might affect how their rocket performed.” And then they did small-scale tests based on their models. [SciLinks: Using Models, Forces, Rocketry, Buoyancy]
Making Sense of Natural Selection describes a unit that culminates with students crafting explanations for how a population may have changed over time due to natural selection, well beyond reciting definitions. The article includes several observations and suggestions for teaching using models. “Instead of identifying models of particular things (like cells, the solar system, or volcanoes), we might want to talk about models for specific reasoning aims (like explaining inheritance or the behavior of matter).” [SciLinks: Natural Selection]

Models can be part of earth and space science, too. Modeling Sunspots describes how high school students in Korea used two types of modeling (data modeling and theoretical modeling) in their study of the Sun. In this extra-curricular club activity, students were challenged to construct models to explain why sunspots changed over time in four patterns (described in the article, along with a chart showing a classification scheme for sunspots). The article includes examples of the student models. [SciLinks: Sunspot Cycles, Solar Activity]
Linked In shows how modeling can be used as a link to other scientific practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts. Models can include “physical representations, conceptual relationships, and simulations.”  The example in the article describes how students used data from classroom activities and computer simulations on electrostatics to construct models of atoms. [SciLinks: Atomic Structure, Rutherford Model of the Atom]
Five strategies for making thinking visible are described in The Modeling Toolkit: small group models that are revised as the unit progresses, whole class consensus models, sticky notes and sentence frames, explanation checklists, and summary tables. The authors provide descriptions of these strategies, strategy for the classroom, and examples of student work.