Student interviews are discussions with students about their understanding of scientific concepts and phenomena. You can do these with individual students or small groups, while the rest of the class is doing independent work. You can also do interviews if you have a team-teaching arrangement.
Portfolios, in assessment terms, are collections of students' work that demonstrate what they have learned and are able to do over a period of time. Portfolios can be kept in folders, binders, large envelopes, boxes or any other containers that allow students to organize their collections and show a diverse collection of work.
Pre-assessment tasks help you to find out what knowledge, experiences, skills and attitudes your students have before you begin any science instruction. In some instances, you might find it useful to have students write their responses to a short set of simple questions on the topic. Examples might be: What is air? Where do clouds come from? What are rocks made out of? What is a fossil?
At the upper elementary grades, concept maps and webs are good ways of seeing what your students know and how they connect their ideas.
Earth science is about active exploration! Here you'll find everything you need to set learning in motion in your classroom.
Because reading skills are crucial for your students, you'll want to look over the Literacy Strategies section. Your students can learn more about geoscience through classroom investigations -- hands-on activities that meet national science standards -- or through "citizen geoscience" activities that your students can do at home.
Method 1: Making a Hypothesis and Defining Variables and Controls.
Students will need an explanation of variables and control groups. Go over these concepts with your students before they try to form their hypotheses. See the Variables Lesson for ideas.
This guide will help you steer your students through the process of coming up with a good question to investigate for an Earth science fair project, designing a way to test that question, and creating a display to share findings and conclusions. The process begins with each student deciding on what he or she finds really interesting in the natural world. Use the navigation bar, above to navigate your way through each step.
This part of the site contains sets of hands-on investigations for a number of Earth science topics. You can be part of the development process for the investigations. In fact, we want feedback from you. Try these investigations out and let us know how they worked for you and what changes or additions you would recommend. Send us your comments by emailing us at education@americangeosciences.org.
In this section you will find strategies that will help your students to comprehend science texts and other written materials dealing with science content. These strategies can be used by teachers in every content area to support literacy instruction. There are 11 strategies in this section. Use the open (+) and close (-) to view the strategies below.
Explain to the students that weather describes their surroundings for a short time. Their journals will serve as an excellent record of weather conditions for a given interval of time. Climate, on the other hand, describes a more established pattern of weather conditions. Climate is the long-term average of weather. It is observed over many years and many seasons. The two most important factors in describing the climate of an area are temperature and precipitation.
