It feels like summer will be over before we know it! Many of you—those who actually had a summer off that is—are busy preparing your classrooms and projects for the coming school year. In the summer Early Years column, An Invertebrate Garden, Peggy Ashbrook described how to attract invertebrates to an outdoor area for later study. Planting flowers to attract butterflies is something we’d all love to do, but be honest, how many of you will be collecting some of our less lovely invertebrates for study?
Even if you don’t have an outdoor space suitable for gardening or invertebrate attraction, there are still many preparations to be made and long-term projects to dream up. Tell us your plans for your classroom below.

Early childhood science educators: this is your place! We’re starting simply but hope to expand this site with your help. Here are a few plans for the blog. We hope you’ll chime in with your suggestions.
Science and Children editors will be:

• posting resources,
• highlighting early childhood articles from S&C and elsewhere, and
• learning from you—the early childhood experts.

Early Years columnist Peggy Ashbrook will be:

• posting about her Early Years columns,
• sharing web finds, and
• talking about her preschool classroom.

You’ll be:

• telling us what you think in Comments,
• finding great ideas, and
• submitting discussion topics (and giving us tips on resources) at earlyyearsblog@nsta.org.

We look forward to working with you as we build this exciting and we hope helpful online early childhood education community!

The solar system, the metric system, the circulatory system, the system of checks and balances, transportation systems, broadcasting systems, information systems, the Dewey Decimal system – we see the word “system” every day in a variety of contexts.
The word “system” refers to a group of interrelated objects that form an integrated whole or that work together to achieve a desired result. The concept of systems is an underlying theme or “big idea” in the sciences. And yet often we concentrate exclusively on the components such that students don’t see how they are connected or affect and influence each other. For example, students learn about the body systems but may not realize how these systems of cells, tissues, organs, and functions are interrelated.
Some people can intuitively see and understand these relationships; others may need guidance and modeling to do so. This month’s Science Scope has several articles with activities that can help students understand this concept.

• Systems Concepts Effectively Taught Using Systems Practices uses a cell phone simulation (that should get students’ attention!) to help students learn about networks.
• Teaching Science Through a Systems Approach has many examples of systems and shows how concept maps can be used to visualize systems.
• Focusing on Function: Thinking Below the Surface of Complex Natural Systems describes how a classroom aquarium can be used to illustrate the structures, behaviors, and functions are connected within a system.

So why should we bother with the concept of systems when there’s so much else to “cover?” Is it all that important? The National Science Education Standards include systems as one of the Unifying Concepts and Processes in science. In Pennsylvania (the state I’m most familiar with), the first science standard category is “Unifying Themes” and the first standard deals with understanding systems! Check your state’s standards in science to see if the concept of systems is mentioned.
The concept lends itself to interdisciplinary studies, too. The article Farm to Table and Beyond describes activities to “help students make sense of the global food system” and integrate their knowledge of biology, geography, economics, and nutrition. And who doesn’t like to think about food! This would be an eye-opening discussion for students who do not live close to the sources of their food.
Log into Scilinks and use the code SS070801 for web resources on the topic of systems theory and examples of more activities. If you’d like more background on systems theory, here are some places to start: General Systems Theory, Systems Theory, System Theory, Systems Thinking, and Introduction to Systems Theory.
Here’s a pop quiz: Our classrooms and schools are examples of systems, too. Are they “open” systems or “closed” ones?

I’m getting ready for a two-week camping trip to upstate New York for a family reunion, sightseeing, and hiking/birdwatching. I’m also looking forward to propping up my feet and reading in the fresh air. As I add to my bag of reading materials, I’m referring to the summer issues of all three NSTA journals for ideas.
The Science Teacher article Take a Voyage of Discovery has suggestions for reading that will take us to special places on Earth, take us through time, and help us reflect on our own classrooms. Keep Up With a Good Book in this month’s Science Scope has even more suggestions, ranging from physical and evolutionary science to biographies of scientists. And Science and Children’s Science Books for Professional Pleasure Reading has lists organized by subjects (biology, earth and space, etc.). I like this list because of the suggested titles are all content-related. Regardless of the grade level you teach, be sure to check out all three articles!
In all three articles, the titles are annotated with a brief description. I downloaded the articles and highlighted the books that look interesting and checked off the ones I’ve already read. I’ll keep the lists in my briefcase all year to refer to. Reading professional and content-related books is an excellent form of professional development. One summer, my district bought several copies of books and gave them to interested teachers. We read the books over the summer, and during the August inservice time, we met and shared what we had read. We fixed up the library to look like a coffee shop, including pastries, and spent a wonderful morning sharing and recommending these professional resources.
Although I have downloaded articles to my laptop (legally of course!) or listened to books on tape on long drives, I’m an old-fashioned dinosaur (or Readasaurus as a student once said). I prefer the real thing when it come to books. I like the feel of the pages and being able to stop and reflect and to page back and forth. My local library is small, but it belongs to a statewide network of libraries so that I can get materials from anywhere! Of course, there’s always the online book sellers, the big book stores, and the NSTA bookstore for getting personal copies!

In the ideal world, every school would have whatever materials it takes to provide quality learning experiences. But our world is not ideal and we teachers have learned to be quite ingenious.
Although the activity in the article Discovery Bottles is written for K-2, this could be adapted into a neat idea for the first day of school at other grade levels, including secondary. The author even gives us lists of themes and what to put in the bottles as well as some questions to focus the students’ observations. I was at a workshop where the presenter used these bottles as an icebreaker. Can you visualize a room full of adults shaking the bottles and trying to identify the 20 objects she had hidden in the bottles? These were ordinary water bottles filled with birdseed instead of sand. The website Discovery Bottles also has suggestions for themes for these bottles. I could see having older students create these for younger ones, too. The article Materials Repurposed also has suggestions for using ordinary materials in making manipulatives for science activities.
The author of You Can Get What You Want describes strategies for securing donations of materials and talent from the community. In addition to the sources mentioned in the article, I’d suggest the warehouses of government agencies or colleges/universities. Many of them have periodic sales of surplus or gently used equipment. I live close to our state capital, and a few of us department chairs would go on a shopping spree every summer to the warehouse. One time we really lucked out. The state had closed a medical facility, and we were able to get several cases of unused test tubes, graduated cylinders, Petri dishes, and other glassware for a total of a few dollars! We also snagged some gently used file cabinets for $5 each. However, I’d be cautious about accepting donations of used technology (I learned this the hard way). Check with you tech coordinator for any district or school guidelines.
Everybody Loves PRISM has another view of science fairs. This topic was also the theme of the December issue of Science and Children and the associated SciLinks blog.
In the February 18 SciLinks blog entry, I mentioned Project BudBurst. And in this month’s issue of S&C, the article Project BudBurst: Analyzing Data has a wonderful idea for integrating this project into classroom activities with the question “How does geography affect plant life cycles?” The article has suggestions for adapting the activity for younger students, but this could be “kicked up a notch” for secondary students, too.
As we can see in these articles every month, one of the best resources we science teachers have is each other!

It’s always amazing to me that there is just about anything you’d want to know (and even things you didn’t know you wanted to know) on the Internet. Just a few clicks in your favorite browser and you’re off on a flight of serendipitous discovery.
While on such a flight the other day, I came across a site that caught my attention: the Poetic Table of the Elements. I did a double take – yes, it’s “poetic” not “periodic.” This intrigued me.
The site has a traditional-looking periodic table, and for each element there are poems about it. Some are factual, others are whimsical, and a few could use some editing. But it’s really fun to see what people came up with.
I continued poking around and found the Periodic Table Printmaking Project, in which artists created blocks for each of the elements. The descriptions of each element include some of its physical properties, but the interesting part is how and why the artists chose their designs.
But then I started thinking. How many of our students have been assigned the traditional “element report”? In the BI times (Before Internet), the main goal of this activity was to get students to find information about a particular element. This was usually accomplished in the library, using text resources. But today, with a few clicks in a browser (or better yet, a search in SciLinks ) students can get pictures and lots of information about the characteristics and properties of any element. Many websites on the periodic table have summary pages for each element. So finding the information is not the exercise it used to be. Why would we ask students to copy facts about an element when the information is already and readily available?
Perhaps another approach might be to ask students to do something with the information – to look for patterns, to create multimedia materials for younger students, to rename an element based on its properties (my favorite was a student who renamed helium after herself – chelsium – because people jokingly called her an airhead), or to create a picture or write a poem.
By the way, I just had to know what the writers came up with to rhyme with Ytterbium!

Whether it’s a riverbank, a lakeshore, or along an ocean or bay, the water is a popular vacation place in the summer. But what if your classroom could be extended to study these places during the school year?
Last fall, on one of the NSTA listservs, Charlie Lindgren from Massachusetts described a project his class was starting. They were studying sand and hypothesizing how and why it might differ from one location to another. The problem was – how to get sand to study. The teacher requested members of the listserv to send samples (he even offered to reimburse postage). This spring, he gave us an update on the project, which was based on a presentation he saw an at NSTA conference.
As a result of the online request, his students received samples from up and down the east coast. The results are described on the Atlantic Coast Sand Lab site. If you click on the locations on the map, you will go to an individual page for each location. By clicking on the “Return to Data” link, you will come to a table with all of the results (use the number in the far left column to see the information on that sample). The student handouts that were used in the project are available at the top of the page.
This is not a complicated website with a lot of bells and whistles, but it represents an authentic use of the technology by students and their teacher. In his listserv message, Charlie described some of the successes and shortcomings of the project and the plans for next year. The plan includes increasing the number of sand samples to include the west coast and freshwater riverbanks and lakeshores from the Appalachian region. He is requesting feedback on the project (electronically, of course) and is looking for additional samples. You can email him to provide any suggestions or for directions on submitting samples.
Here are some other resources on sand:

• Sand website from Pasadena City College
• Sand Lab booklet from the New Jersey Marine Sciences Consortium
• Sands of the World from a school in Rhode Island.
• In NSTA’s Science Objects the earth science objects have several on rocks, including sedimentary rocks.

For many teachers, the word “notebook” conjures up an image of a folder or binder in which students attach lab reports, homework, class handouts and notes, tests and quizzes, and/or completed worksheets. The students are given a list of required documents and the required order in which they should appear in the notebook. The notebooks are graded periodically on how complete they are and on whether the documents are in the required order. Teachers would tell the students to “study” from them. At the end of the school year, some students would take them home; others would casually discard them as they cleaned out their desks or lockers.
However, there’s a lot of talk about going beyond these simple organizational strategies for archives or document repositories to helping students create a more useful and personalized notebook, one that won’t be tossed away at the end of the year. These approaches recognize the importance of helping students become better at recording and analyzing data and at using writing to reflect on and communicate what they are learning.
There are many teacher websites that list the required elements for class notebooks (just Google “science notebook” for some examples). But here are some ideas that you can use to revise your class notebook activity:

• I’d start with looking at the NSTA publication Using Science Notebooks in Elementary Classroomby Michael Klentschy. Don’t be put off by the title if you’re a secondary teacher. The concepts are the same, and the strategies would be useful if your students are not used to organizing their thoughts and notes for themselves. There are many examples of students work, and I was blown away by what these little ones are doing and thinking! You can even read a sample chapter online.
• Science Notebooks in K-12 Classrooms produced by the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership in Washington state is a an excellent resource, with lots of examples of student work, templates, and documents – including many in Spanish.
• Using Science Notebooks K-8 is a teacher resource provided by the Tucson Unified School District with suggestions for using notebooks, their benefits and advantages, and LOTS of examples of student work.
• If you’re an NSTA member, you can download several articles for FREE from NSTA’s Science Store including Science Notebook Essentials by Michael Klentschy.
• The Scientist’s Notebook Toolkit from the East Bay Collaborative in Rhode Island is another resource that is rich in suggestions and examples.
• The Interactive Notebook Tutorial was designed by a California teacher to acquaint her students with creating and using notebooks. But teachers can learn, too.
• The ERIC Digest, Science Notebooks: Tools For Increasing Achievement Across the Curriculum, provides a rationale for using science notebooks and discusses their effect on learning.

One thing that I like about many of these books, articles, and online resources is their inclusion of lots of examples of students work. Secondary teachers will be amazed at the depth of knowledge expressed by younger students! And I’m sure we’ll think: If these students can do it, so can mine! But I suspect that these students did not catch on to a new approach to notebooks right away, especially if they have had many years of explicit directions on exactly what papers and information to put in a notebook. Their teachers had to provide lots of modeling, feedback, and persistence to get to the point where the notebook is an integral part of their science classes. But any teacher I’ve talked to about these notebooks says that it is worth the effort.
Of course, if students don’t see a useful purpose for their notebooks, the notebooks become just another item to carry around. By following up on activities, revisiting past assignments or notes, and using the notebooks during projects or open-ended assessments, students can see the value of having a notebook.

It’s summer and maybe some of us are involved in writing/revising the science curriculum for our schools. Rather than just creating a laundry list of topics to be “covered” based on a textbook table of contents, you might be looking for some resources that combine content with inquiry processes, that are a comprehensive set of classroom activities with materials and multimedia components, and that include references to your state’s standards.
I recently came across the materials available through the Office of Science Education at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The main page has many resources and is worth a look, but I was impressed by what I found when I clicked on the Curriculum Supplements link. These are arranged by grade level (high school, middle school, and elementary levels). You can request a print copy for some of them, but the complete resource is available on line for all of them.
These are called “supplements,” but these are more complete that most resources I’ve seen! Each one has a content summary, and the web versions have suggestions for classroom use and links to multimedia activities. The teacher’s guide has background information on the topic, a wealth of classroom resources including a student manual, and all of the materials can be downloaded as PDF files. The student activities link leads to the multimedia and animations that complement the print and web-based materials.
Another neat feature is the alignment of these supplements to the state standards. On the page listing the supplements for each level, there is a link to the “state standards” for each one. I clicked on my state for one of the supplements, and not only were the relevant science standards listed, but also the relevant standards in mathematics, health, and communications!
Some of the topics in the high school supplements include cell biology and cancer, infectious diseases, human genetics, the brain, and cellular/molecular biology. The middle school topics include inquiry, healthy behaviors, the skeletal and muscular systems, the brain, mental illness, and chemicals in the environment. The elementary topic (right now there is only one) is on teeth and oral health.
Many of these individual supplements have been added to SciLinks over the years. They rate highly in the SciLinks rubrics for design and resource integration. It’s great to see all of the NIH resources in one place! Why re-create what you can get here?

Teachers (and administrators) love so see the word “free.” FREE in this case stands for Federal Resources for Excellence in Education. This website, maintained by the U.S. Department of Education, has links to hundreds of web-based resources, categorized by subject area. These sites are submitted by U.S. agencies, such as NASA, NOAA, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, most of the cabinet agencies, the National Archives, the National Park Service, the Census Bureau, and a number of others.
This is a goldmine of excellent resources. For example, the latest updates in science include a video on nanotechnology, an overview of NASA missions, a lesson idea for helping students understand the concept of a “planet,” and a lesson idea in which elementary students create a system for filtering gray water. But I also enjoy looking at the sites in other content areas. The newest topics include teaching with spreadsheets, excerpts from the diaries of 19th century pioneers traveling to the Pacific coast, and an overview of the artwork of M.C. Escher. All without leaving my laptop!
Rather than trying to remember to check the site for new updates, you can subscribe to a RSS feed (directions are on the site), or you can get on the mailing list and receive an e-mail message each month with links to the newest sites added.