When winter rolls around, keeping yourself and your home warm is of the utmost importance. Heating your home seems like a simple subject to tackle, but there are many heating systems available, requiring different fuels, installations, and costs. The various fuel types and their environmental footprints will be the focus of this month's column.…

Students' difficulties with accurately conceptualizing the relationships among the Earth, Moon, and Sun are well documented. Any teacher who has seen the film "A Private Universe" (Schneps and Sadler 1988) will remember the challenge the interviewees experienced when trying to explain their understanding of this phenomenon. This paper describes a…

In the Walking Out Graphs Lesson described here, students experience several types of representations used to describe motion, including words, sentences, equations, graphs, data tables, and actions. The most important theme of this lesson is that students have to understand the consistency among these representations and form the habit of…

The purpose of this article is to share a learning-cycle sequence of lessons designed to convey the particulate nature of matter through use of physical models and analogical thinking. This activity was adapted from Conceptual Chemistry, a long-running professional development program for teachers of grades 4-9. Conceptual Chemistry's approach is…

Summer is a time for personal enrichment for teachers. Many travel, take formal classes, or work as interns or volunteers in scientific endeavors. But whatever the schedule, it's also a time for teachers to get back to basics. Instead of being forced to keep one step ahead of the textbook, teachers find that summer provides opportunities to catch…

For NSTA, 2001-2002 was a productive year as they worked to fulfill their mission and meet the presidential goals of "Learning Science and the Science of Learning." They enhanced many of their traditional offerings while bringing several new popular programs and initiatives to fruition. As always, they aimed to give teachers a variety of rich…