According to the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education (2018), only 16% of the elementary teachers surveyed reported including hands-on activities in all or most of their lessons. Strategies that engage students in hands-on investigations help improve student achievement (Minner, Levy, and Century 2010) and provide students with a…

What does a scientist do? What is an engineer? What is technology? What do mathematicians do? Questions about the nature of STEM are fundamental to help elementary students gain a deep understanding of the STEM disciplines. Yet, starting a lesson with such abstract questions can be difficult for any learner. Instead, teachers can use concrete STEM…

The population of emergent bilingual students (EBs, or English Language Learners, ELLs) is growing steadily in the United States. One common approach to language instruction for EBs is to expose students to a lesson's content vocabulary before teaching the lesson to build students' word banks and background knowledge. An example of this is the…

Preparing elementary students to think and communicate like an engineer is possible, but requires a sequence of lessons spanning multiple classroom experiences that are aligned to multiple performance expectations (PEs). This article identifies how multiple PEs can be clustered to meet the instructional goals set forth in the "Next Generation…

Using the practices in three-dimensional learning means that a classroom community of students working alongside the teacher identifies questions and debates how to make progress. Students should see each step of their work as addressing goals they have set. This article explores a strategy developed by researchers and teachers for supporting…

The United States is divided into 15 broad ecological regions, each one home to a variety of fascinating native plants. In the Southwest, creosote bushes are found in and around the Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Sonoran deserts at elevations below 5,000 feet and is one of the oldest living things on Earth--approximately 11,700 years old. This evergreen…

In today's dynamic global economy, integrated units of study are particularly important. Students who are fluent in several disciplines and comfortable moving among them can make meaningful connections and maintain enhanced understandings (Sias et al. 2016). This article shares an integrated STEAM unit that is grounded in the science disciplinary…

The activity presented in this article is part of a four-part module that centers earthquakes as a common phenomenon that students experience and introduces the idea of a resonant frequency. When the seismic waves from an earthquake encounter a building, the subsequent oscillating motion of the ground causes the building to move back and forth.…

Effective teachers understand the importance of asking the right kind of questions to facilitate the learning of all their students. By learning what questions to ask and when, teachers can engage their students in instruction that aligns to the vision of the "Next Generation Science Standards" (Benedict-Chambers et al. 2017; NGSS Lead…

This article describes how using a variety of differentiation strategies, such as listening to stories, visualizing scenarios, and performing tactile activities, can help fourth-grade students to conceive of and express examples of energy transfer.

This article describes a three-dimensional 5E (Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaboration, Evaluation) lesson that investigates 3-LS4-1: Analyze and interpret data from fossils to provide evidence of the organisms and the environments in which they lived. A phenomena-based approach was used to engage third graders in the story of Maya, who…

Growing up in a small coastal town, students spend a great deal of time outdoors and at the beach. Given the many learning opportunities that such an environment can provide, engaging students in a sustained, environmental service project seemed like a natural complement to lessons focusing on the interaction of organisms within a habitat. This…

Both children and adults struggle to explain the cause of the day/night cycle and the seasons (Schoon 1995). Early elementary students may not be developmentally ready to explain that patterns of day and night are caused by Earth's rotation on its axis, or that the seasons are caused by Earth's tilted axis as the planet revolves around the Sun.…

While there is consensus in the science education community on the importance of crosscutting concepts (CCCs) for all students, teachers have been given limited guidance on how to integrate CCCs into science instruction. In this article, the authors propose that teachers view CCCs as resources that students use in their everyday lives to make…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" call for engaging students in practices that scientists and engineers use (NGSS Lead States 2013), but it's also important to explicitly teach thinking approaches that scientists and engineers use. One way to help children think and act like scientists and engineers is to engage them with…