If one day all the time you have is 10 minutes, a quick talk circle can be used to keep students thinking about the phenomena they are trying to figure out. For example, a talk circle might take 10 minutes while an investigation could take 30 minutes. This unit is written broken down into days but is flexible in regards to time. How can I possibly squeeze in hands-on, student-led science instruction when we already don’t have enough time in the day for ELA and math requirements? Where am I getting all these materials? Although we don’t have all the answers, there’s ways to incorporate meaningful, phenomena-based science even with these constraints. If you ask any elementary school teacher about challenges regarding science instruction, more times than not, the discussion of time and materials arise. The Challenges of Finding Time for Science As the unit builds in complexity, students participate in various investigations, science talks, and engineering tasks that all focus on figuring out core ideas about why those eight animals look so weird. ![]() S’s first-grade class, students are presented with eight strange looking animals as the anchoring phenomena for a first-grade life science unit using the crosscutting concept of structure. When given the task of engaging a class of seven-year-olds, what could be better than awkward, thought-provoking, strange looking animals? In Mrs. It is based on this principle that this unit was designed to leverage the rich intellectual resources that ALL young learners bring to our classrooms. Encouraging the use of everyday oral language, especially with emergent multilingual students, can lead to better and more coherent instructional approaches that promote both science and language learning for all students ( Lee, Grapin, and Haas 2018).Īnn Rosebery and Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes ( 2006) wrote that “whether students’ ideas are right or wrong, they nonetheless constitute the intellectual ‘stuff’ available for teaching and learning” (p. It is their right to express themselves using all of their language resources.”Īs students engage in “doing science and engineering,” they rely heavily on oral language in trying to make sense of phenomena. ![]() “Multilingual students’ learning and participation increase when they have access to a broader repertoire of ways to make sense of and talk about the natural phenomena they investigate and observe. ( 2020), articulated the following in their STEM Teaching Tool centered on science vocabulary and conceptual meaning: Choosing to initially allow and highlight everyday language is a conscious shift away from pre-teaching vocabulary and toward students driving their own need for more nuanced ways of describing these phenomenal animals. ![]() While most students begin by describing the external features as weird, the class quickly agrees that they need a better way to describe what they actually mean by weird. In this article we highlight the use of the word weird in describing this group of animals with an extreme diversity of physical features because of the entry point this gives to all learners. Throughout this unit, students use their initial observations about weird looking animals to help them start to think about structure and function-an important crosscutting concept-and to begin to discover animal diversity. Imagine peering into a first-grade classroom and hearing a bunch of six- and seven-year-olds saying things like, “WHOA that fish has slits across its eyes” and “it’s got spikes all over its body!” while others exclaim “Why does that animal have a huge nose but the other one doesn’t even look like it has a face?!” This is student engagement at its finest-and this is what happens when you use phenomena-based instruction to light up the world of science for young students.
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