The Early Years

Editor's Note

Through regular classroom communications teachers facilitate family partnership in nature-based learning. Teachers can promote family engagement in the local environment and foster lifelong naturalists with a strong commitment to the earth through consistent welcoming invitations via classroom communications. Strategies for supporting families to engage in activities in their local environment are described. By strengthening nature-connectedness, dedication to sustainability, and environmental literacy teachers assist in the development of citizens who will advocate for the earth and its environment.

This article presents a framework to design lesson plans for elementary science teachers using insights from a summer-long research experience for teachers (RET) workshop (National Science Foundation, 2021) to learn strategies to weave ISK (and WMS) into environmental science curriculum and instruction. While ISK has also led to technologies that optimize agriculture, stewardship of the land, and foraging and harvesting plants and animals, these activities should be implemented in sustainable reciprocity with the natural world, focusing on both conservation as well as preservation. Incorporating ISK to the elementary science curriculum will not only reconcile its historical absence but also helps to overcome 21st century challenges related to cultivating a sense of environmental stewardship and encouraging sustainable habits among youth as well as developing students’ awareness of under-represented and diverse means of thinking about the natural world from ISK perspectives. This article, we explore ISK, WMS, and relationships therein and examine a framework to guide ISK lesson development in environmental science for an elementary audience that honors and amplifies the importance of ISK as intertwined with WMS standards and curricula. Further, one example lesson from the RET is provided on bison bone usage from the Apsalooké and other Plains Indian nations.

Sustainable Schoolyards is a 5-month professional learning program run by the California Global Education Project to facilitate teachers working with teachers to create and implement climate justice projects. The program meets virtually 3 times between January and May, with follow-up support in between. Virtual connections with another classroom show students they are not alone in their actions. The program helps teachers prepare students to take action for social justice using both the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Competence Framework. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals help teachers and students connect the specific action they are taking on local issues to action being taken around the world and the Global Competence Framework helps teachers and students build capacity for global competence, and prepare for a world of increasing complexity, diversity and interconnectedness. Examples are shared from a TK and Kindergarten classroom that participated in the Sustainable Schoolyards, and were paired up for the virtual exchange component of the program. The TK class engaged in a school-wide campaign about food waste and composting, and the Kindergarten class learned about responsible production and consumption, and published a book to share their knowledge with their community.

Science in the elementary grades is often deprioritized in comparison to ELA and mathematics. We wondered, how comprehensively, frequently, and consistently is science included in elementary schools’ schedules? We reviewed daily schedules for 14 schools in 9 districts across the U.S. to qualitatively examine how science is represented on the daily instructional schedule. These schools were selected as “best case scenarios” recommended by district or state science leaders as places where science is taken seriously. We complemented these schedules with data from 21 interviews with teachers, science specialists, and school leaders to better understand how science actually appears in children’s daily instructional experiences. We found that, in these schools, science is taught comprehensively (though not as comprehensively as ELA or mathematics), has the potential for being taught frequently (even in the lower elementary grades), and is taught somewhat consistently (albeit usually in some kind of rotation with social studies). We present implications for how leaders can craft school schedules to make science comprehensive, frequent, and consistent in the elementary grades, to provide important opportunities to learn and thrive for all children.

Schoolyards and school gardens present a rich context for students to engage with engineering and design. We describe the Designing Trellises unit, an example of a guided 3rd-5th grade engineering experience in the garden. In this unit, students work collaboratively toward a shared classroom design goal: creating 2-3 pea plant trellises for the school garden. They collaboratively design, research, prototype, build, and test their trellis designs. Students figure out disciplinary core ideas about balanced and unbalanced forces through engagement in asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, designing solutions and other science and engineering practices. At the end of the unit, teachers and students report that students feel a strong sense of agency and pride as they ask and answer questions and create designs that are important to them and their community.

The Poetry of Science

Science 101