Atlas of Science Literacy

This groundbreaking book is every school’s road map to helping children learn science systematically. Using the Atlas as your guide, trace the prerequisites for learning in each grade, make the connections to support science content, and show the way to the next steps to learning for your students.

ISBN: 0-871-68668-6

Vincent Campbell, Jocelyn Lofstrom and Brian Jerome

Make up your mind—thoughtfully. Guide students to use scientific ways of thinking to make everyday decisions. As students master the skills of decision-making, they will be able to:

• Define problems
• Identify viable options
• Research risks and benefits
• Reach decisions based on rational methods, and
• Present the decision coherently and logically.

Offers full background material on decision-making, 10 guided activities with separate student and teacher pages, 14 extended learning exercises, and assessment rubrics to evaluate student work. Includes activities in life, physical, environmental, and Earth Science disciplines.

ISBN: 0-873-55165-6

Marlene Thier, University of California, Berkeley,
Bennett Daviss

Whether you’re a teacher new to science or a veteran teacher of science, here’s a powerful new tool for teaching the subject through language literacy. This book explains how instructional synergy and power result from combining the two subjects. And it shows how teachers can use practical classroom techniques for combining these subjects at different grade levels, from elementary to high school.

Unlike other books that concentrate on reading and writing, this book defines “literacy in science” as more encompassing: it includes speaking, listening, and media analysis. In chapters devoted to each of these literacy skills, authors Marlene Thier and Bennett Daviss detail specific metacognitive techniques that teachers can use to coach students to become independent learners. By combining science, language, and guided inquiry, teachers can empower students to think and express themselves about science more effectively, improving their learning and retention. To this end, the authors provide lists of explicit performance expectations in each of the five areas of literacy for learning science. Reproducible pages including these performance expectations, graphics, and other metacognitive aids can be used by teachers and students alike to guide and assess growth in the use of language through science activities.

ISBN 0-325-00459-5

Roger Osborne, Peter Freyberg

This book is about the way in which children learn science and the notions about science that they bring to the classroom. The authors reveal that all children develop ideas about science and concepts about how the world works before they come to school. This is simply a child’s way of dealing with his environment. So often science teaching takes no account of this built in knowledge, but dismisses it as incorrect. Here the authors suggest that a teacher’s more productive strategy is to accept that children have certain concepts, and then to build on those as a stepping stone towards more sophisticated and “correct” learning. They propose convincingly that science is seen as a difficult subject largely because the teacher traditionally expends so much effort on combating a child’s existing knowledge. A central concern of the book is with teaching students age 10 15, though the issues are relevant to all age levels.

ISBN 0-435-57260-1

Edited by Johanna Scott, Deakin University, Australia

This book examines the links that exist between science and language learning and teaching, helping teachers understand how language can support science and how to use science to develop children’s language. Scott provides a wealth of information that will both reassure and encourage teachers. She examines the role that language plays in science learning; the ways that science can be used to develop children’s language; and how increased knowledge of language goes hand in hand with the development of science concepts. The theoretical issues raised are discussed within the context of classrooms, providing teachers with suggestions, ideas, approaches, and the reasons for using them.

ISBN 0-435-08338-4

Hal Hemmerich, Wendy Lim, Kanwal Neel

Primetime’s innovative strategies help students become autonomous, life-long learners as they discover the significance of mathematics and science in the “real” world. Based on extensive classroom experience, the strategies are defined and presented in easy-to-follow directions. All are organized around three aspects of learning: activating prior knowledge, multiple intelligences, and reflections. Student samples, ready-to use strategy reviews, and checklists are included.

ISBN 0-435-08363-5