Collaboration is key for many scientific endeavors, and an opportunity for growth for teachers. Here’s how two preschool teachers, both with a science outlook but from opposite coasts, came to present a workshop together.   A writer of The Early Years column in  Science and Children, I (Peggy) yearn for a larger community of like-minded early childhood educators. Many of the classroom teachers I get to work with have so many duties that they are very happy to “leave the science to someone else” most of the time. When teachers contribute to the Teacher’s Picks section of the column, I get a glimpse into another teacher’s classroom and the broadening experience of collaboration as I look at resources from another’s viewpoint.
Marie Faust Evitt contributed a “Teacher’s Picks” list of resources and in our discussions we found out that we are living parallel lives, teaching preschool, excited about doing science with young children, and writing about it. A year of email conversation later we decided to learn more from each other by presenting together.
What I’ve learned from Marie:

• West coast children also love to explore varied materials.
• Plastic rain gutters are indispensable classroom equipment.
• Playing “air soccer” by waving cardboard sheets to blow packing peanuts across a table is learning through play.
• Doing science activities in a BIG way is meaningful to children and worth teachers’ time and effort.

Join one of the NSTA lists, group e-mail discussions that allow members to exchange information in a peer-to-peer forum, to benefit from being part of a science-teaching interested community. Newbies asking questions are welcomed, gentle direction is offered to veteran teachers and beginners alike as we try out our ideas and refine our science and education thinking within the community.
Peggy

My reading matter for the trip to the NSTA Portland conference is How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition, (National Academy Press, 2000) and a fantasy novel, Dragonsbane by by Barbara Hambly (Del Rey, 1987). Both works relate how students (people) have preconceptions about how the world is supposed to be, and that incorrect ones get in the way of building correct understanding. This idea is important to teachers who want to introduce new concepts and information…and to witches who want to convince a court noble that dragonslayers may not resemble their description in an epic song.
How People Learn emphasizes that teachers need to be aware of their students’ existing understanding of a topic and give them ways to challenge that understanding to build an expanded understanding or be able to replace any incorrect preconceptions. As an early childhood educator I need this book to help me avoid creating or supporting misconceptions in children’s ideas about science.
Good reads, both!
Peggy

More than 60 educators crowded into room C124 at the Convention Center this afternoon to ponder the imponderable: the size and scale of the universe?
With humor and knowledge Herb Koller, a retired high school teacher representing Imaginova Corp, demonstrated how teachers can use the Starry Night astronomy program in the classroom to help students gain perspective on distances in space. Whether you were looking to learn about our solar system or prefer to consider all that is beyond, the program had something, and lesson plans, too.

Have you ever thought about writing for an NSTA journal?
Get the tools you need at Write (Right) from the Start. After an overview of the manuscript submission process, editors of all four journals (Science and Children, Science Scope, The Science Teacher, and the Journal of College Science Teaching) give personal feedback to propsective writers.
You can get some of the benefits of this session online at www.nsta.org/pdfs/writestart.pdf.
Find calls for papers for all four journals at www.nsta.org.
Look for the next Write For session in New Orleans!

Overly political, endlessly complicated…and standing-room only, featured speaker Dr. Philip Mote had a receptive audience for his climate change talk. Coauthor (with 100+ participating scientists) of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, Mote’s humor-filled talk began with the popular representations of climate change and how they affect public perception. The scientific portion focused on a “dialogue with a skeptic” and featured clear evidence (that only lost me on the modeling part). It’s not every day you get to hear a Nobel Prize winning scientist speak!
For more information, visit http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm.

Need a pick me up after a full day of NSTA conference sessions? Head to Cacao, a chocolate shop with the feel of an asian tea house. A shot of “drinking chocolate”–think a liquid chocolate bar, not a powdered mix—only costs $2.

Portland has a lot to offer, but if you only have time for one thing, make it Powell’s. The largest independent bookstore in the world fills a city block and features used gems tucked among the enormous selection–including a science and an education section. Plan on spending hours here! (they are open until 11)

One of my roles on the SciLinks team is to find resources for a specific topic. Using several search engines, I browse through the lists and select sites for a more intense review and approval process. You as a SciLinks user then have a list of websites for a given topic that have been reviewed and whose content has been correlated with the National Science Education Standards.
Occasionally, I come across a resource for a specific topic that is part of a larger, more general collection. I’d like to call your attention to Teachers’ Domain, sponsored by the WGBH Educational Foundation. This is an indexed and annotated collection of multimedia resources from public television. I’ve used the URL to the main site (http://www.teachersdomain.org) in the link above so that you can share it with your colleagues in other content areas.
There are so many wonderful science resources on public television, but getting these resources into the classroom used to be a challenge. We could order a tape of a program from a regional library and hope that it would be delivered in time to use in our lesson, we could purchase a copy if our budgets permitted, or we could tape off the air, with appropriate permissions, assuming that the programming matched our lesson. In the analog tape media, it was hard to pinpoint a brief clip or a series of clips.
But this digital collection solves the problem. From this site you can access hundreds of individual multimedia resources (video clips, photographs, audio files, animations, PDF documents) anytime from any computer with an Internet connection. Most of these resources have a generous use policy. All of them can be used online, most can be downloaded, and many can be shared or added to your own presentations. The site also has a set of lesson plans that integrate these resources. These lessons are very good, and many of them have been added to SciLinks. There are links to professional development opportunities offered by PBS, too.
The site can be used with or without a registration/login (which is free). I did go through the registration process, which requires that you list your school or affiliation. If your school/district is not listed, you can add it. The advantage of registering is that when you find a resource, it is correlated to your state’s academic standards. Registration also gives you access to online folders to “save” resources for future projects or lesson.
With the websites in SciLinks and the multimedia resources of Teachers’ Domain, you’ll all set to help students explore topics visually and to take students beyond the classroom walls.

Today I visited the Rainbow Preschool, a half-day preschool with extended care in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of NE Portland. Teachers Nicki and Amanda and their students welcomed me into their world where science activities include caring for two guinea pigs, digging and pouring sand, building with dominoes,  and many opportunities to use symbols to represent actions (name cards into a cup when you take your snack, job board, and daily schedule using photos).

I was reminded of an article in the September 2008 NAEYC journal Young Children, What Do Children Learn by Trying to Produce the Domino Effect? by Kyoko Ozaki, Naoko Yamamoto, Constance Kamii.
Visiting other classrooms always invigorates me and I appreciate the welcome to investigate at Rainbow Preschool. Reading journals such as, Young Children and Science and Children is another way to find out what’s happening in other programs. The article on children using dominoes particularly interested me and I hope to add them to the science room rotation of blocks soon.
Peggy

A few years ago, one of the speakers at our school’s career day was a graduate who was an environmental scientist. A student asked her what she did all day. The audience expected her to say things such as I do chemical tests. I spend all day on the river. I look at things through a microscope. I walk through the woods. I do experiments. But her answer surprised everyone. She said that she spends as much time on communications, especially on writing, as on anything else. She described how much of her work involves taking notes, writing reports, preparing presentations, writing articles for publication, writing brief updates for her funding agencies, writing and answering emails and letters, conversing with her colleagues, and writing entries in her daily log. I suspect that a similar response would come from those in many other professions and jobs, too.
So it appears that if we want our students to have authentic, real-life experiences in science, our classes will have to include more activities that involve communicating about what the students are learning. Fortunately, there are many resources to help us, including this month’s Science Scope with several articles that discuss writing in science:

• Learning to Write and Writing to Learn in Science describes refutational text – a type of persuasive writing. I was interested in this because in my state’s writing assessment, narrative writing is not assessed at the middle and high school levels. The emphasis is on persuasive and informational. The article has a copy of the rubric that the author has used and a description of how the process is modeled and integrated in the classroom.
• Using Science Journals to Encourage All Students to Write shows how writing can be a warm-up or summary activity, an assessment, or a discussion-starter. There are suggestions for modeling and guiding students through the process, a rubric, samples of feedback, and ideas for logistics.
• Science and Literacy—Making Connections Through Writing has suggestions for guiding students through responding to open-ended questions and makes an interesting connection between the inquiry process and the writing process.
• Science SLAMS—A Reading Strategy for Answering Open-Ended Questions goes beyond a description of the strategy and teaching suggestions. The author did an action research project to determine the effectiveness of using the strategy!

Another resource is SciLinks. Use the code SS110801 for websites on communications. Many of them deal specifically with reading in science. One that I like in particular is Connecting Elementary Science and Literacy. For each step of an inquiry process, this page has suggested resources for incorporating communications skills. (Although the title says “elementary” other grade levels can use this resource!)
You may also want to check out the November 2008 issue of Science and Children and the November 2007 issue of Science Scope for more articles and resources. Mention the idea of using a template for student writing, and you’ll get a variety of responses (for example, ask your English teachers about the five-paragraph essay). Some teachers feel that using templates constrains student writing to a cookie-cutter format, with little room for individuality or creativity. Others suggest that using a template can guide students through the writing process, especially students who have not had much experience in a particular style or in writing for a specific purpose. Most of us probably have a format we want students to use for a lab report or a journal entry. It’s been my experience that most students appreciate having a template (or a format or a set of guidelines) at first. After a while they can expand, customize, or embellish their work to express their creativity. It’s hard to think outside the box when you don’t know what the box is!