Because students have often been conditioned as passive learners and receivers of knowledge, it can be difficult for them to persevere in solving authentic problems. Nevertheless, teachers must persist in preparing students as problem solvers and critical thinkers. In an urban inner-city neighborhood school in the southeast, students embarked on a…

Computer science (CS) and computational thinking (a problem-solving process used by computer scientists) teach students design, logical reasoning, and problem solving--skills that are valuable in life and in any career. Computational thinking (CT) concepts such as decomposition teach students how to break down and tackle a large complex problem.…

Citizen science provides an opportunity for students to capture data both locally and globally while supporting the real-time work of scientists seeking to understand natural events. In this article, the authors present a project-based approach that explores climate at home and abroad to help develop elementary students' local-to-global…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") challenge prevalent beliefs that young children are "not ready" to understand natural selection, introducing core aspects in grades 1, 2, and 3 (NGSS Lead States 2013). The authors' research and teaching team engaged in a multiyear project to understand how early grades…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") state that by the end of fifth grade, students are expected to understand the water cycle, also called the hydrologic cycle, and the three states of matter in which water can exist (NGSS Lead States 2013). Logically, many educators choose to teach these topics concurrently or…

Observing children tossing a ball in a game of catch or pumping their legs to move a swing, it is obvious that they have already experienced and learned to control the basics of pushes and pulls. Through everyday experiences as simple as rolling a ball across the floor, to more complex activities like team sports, children are building a…

Science and engineering practices (SEPs) and crosscutting concepts (CCs) constitute a significant part of "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012). As teachers, the role of the authors is to highlight the pivotal role that both scientific knowledge and the practices used to generate knowledge play in learning. This article…

Electricity is an integral part of daily life. Children, like adults, infer the effects of electrical conductivity. They see the illumination of a lightbulb or feel the emission of warmth from an electric stovetop but may not understand the role electrical circuits play. Focusing on the concrete aspects of electrical energy transfer helps improve…

Global connections are an important part of the elementary classroom as they help students develop empathy through interactions while allowing them to apply classroom learning to the outside world (Suvansri 2016). Through Partnering with a classroom in another country the author hoped to create curiosity while helping students build a global…

The authors describe how grade 4 students carried out an investigation about growing cucumbers (members of the curcurbit or gourd family) where they read information sources about seed variety; germinated seeds under different conditions; measured and partitioned growing spaces; collected and analyzed data on germination, true leaf growth, and…

Representation in science is anything that stands for something else--drawings, pictures, graphs, or other representational forms (Danish et al. 2020). Representations serve as public displays of phenomena that make aspects of those phenomena explicit (Gilbert 2008). They can serve to make the invisible visible, communicate ideas, display…

STEM is a commonly used acronym in today's education world. Parents hear the term and hope their child's school will be embracing it, teachers plan units encompassing it, even those outside the education realm have heard it and think it is important. But, do students actually understand the four disciplines and can they clearly express what they…

This column provides background science information for elementary teachers. This month's issue helps teachers to understand color mixing so that they can teach this information to students.

Engineering design-based learning entered the discourse of science education with the release of the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013). Since that time there has been a focused effort to embed engineering design and engineering-based thinking in elementary school experiences. As thinking like an engineer is…

It is well established that drawing upon students' Funds of Knowledge (FoK) supports powerful learning outcomes, especially for youth whose life experiences are not always valued in dominant classroom spaces. Yet, teachers can struggle to find ways to do so (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2005). In this article, the authors introduce an…