Tending Our Common Ground

Each of these books is an introduction to a different dimension or element of NGSS.

“What is Science?” is the one I use to introduce the NGSS Disciplinary Core Ideas.

“What is a Scientist?” is the one I used to introduce the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices.

But each of the other books represents one of the seven NGSS Crosscutting Concepts! Can you guess which one is which?!

Our introduction brainstorming game before learning about the Science and Engineering Practices of NGSS! 🔍🌡️📊📚

This lesson starts with the brainstorm of why people travel and all of the different ways that they travel. And then we discuss why SEEDS might want to travel and pose a question about the different ways that we think they might travel?

Students explore many different types of seeds, looking for clues as to how they might travel. Then they can even test some of those hypotheses out, by trying to stick a seed to some fake fur or see if it will blow in the wind of a fan or float in a tub of water. 💦 💨 🐻

Go, Grow, Glow is a way to talk to students about how food is fuel for our body and how different foods support our bodies in different ways. You can see on the paper plate project here, that we first reflect on the ways that we aspire to go, grow, and glow. And then we learn about the different foods that can help us get there. Carbohydrates that help us go, proteins that help us grow, fruits and vegetables full of vitamins and minerals that help us glow from the inside out! 🌞

After our “Soil to Strawberry Salsa” card sort activity, students can make strawberry salsa! They can use kid safe knives to roughly chop the strawberries, onion, and jalapeño, they can pick the leaves off of the cilantro with their hands, they can measure and pour the honey and lime juice. Then, they put it all in a hand crank food processor to chop and combine! 🍓

As a follow up to the exploration described in the previous post, students are then asked, “Do all of these plants have all of these parts right now? Why or why not?” and then leading to “How do a plant and its parts change over time?”

Students then explore the outdoor area looking for evidence of how a single type of plant and its structures change over time. While we are sharing our stories, we notice when an end meets the beginning again and name that story a circle or a cycle. ⭕️ Sometimes, we can use chalk to fill in what we think we might see next in the cycle, even if we didn’t find it in the schoolyard during that season.

In our NGSS workshops, teachers participate as students and act as scientists - exploring the outdoor phenomena before constructing their own explanations of it.

In this case, they were prompted with the questions “About how many different types of plants do you think you can see from here?” And “How do you think those plants are the same and different from each other?” That conversation was guided to the idea that many plants have the same structures. Students were then given time to explore the outdoor area gathering different structures from different plants. When they returned to the whole group area, students worked together to sort all of the plant parts they found into groups. Then, they labeled each group (sometimes with many synonyms, such as stem, trunk, limb) and used their observations and prior knowledge to make a hypothesis about the function of each.

This model lesson was a way to demonstrate how teachers can facilitate student-led exploration before explanation.

“Soil to Strawberry Salsa”

At our workshops this week, teachers were challenged to arrange these “characters” into a “story” with a beginning, middle, and end. They discussed the relationships between the characters and the sequence they may go in for a story and before long, they realized that not all stories are linear - some move in a circle and we call those stories CYCLES!

This activity focuses on the NGSS Disciplinary Cores Ideas of interdependent relationships and energy transfer in ecosystems.

Creating a model of plant structures, singing about the structures’ functions (“Roots, Stems, Leaves” by ) and modeling the process of pollination that turns the flower into a fruit 🐝🌸🔜🍓 We don’t have any fun in our workshops! 😉