Visiting the city of Portland, Oregon and the waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge invigorated my thinking about taking classes outside. Hiking part-way up the Eagle Creek trail reminded me that being comfortable in a natural area can take practice. As I held onto a cable while rounding a bend in the path high above the creek, I was feeling something between anxiety and acute awareness of the consequences of tripping on the rocky path. Now when I take a group of city teachers and children into a nearby city natural area, I will be more understanding of teachers who caution children not to step off the paved path or those who flinch when insects whiz by. And I resolve to get outside with the classes more often.
Here is Latourelle Falls, seen from the base at a distance and then up close to show the columnar jointing of the basalt volcanic rock. It is a short walk down a paved path from a stop along the Columbia River Scenic Highway.

(Click on the photos to see a larger view.)
Peggy

It was exciting to be in the midst of so many people who care about teaching and learning science, and a pleasure to anticipate being on the receiving end of lesson planning. I’m looking forward to using what other educators thought was important enough to share.  More on this later, in the comments …
Peggy

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.