Evansdale Eagles
Week of April 10-15
Need to Know....
- I hope everyone had an awesome spring break!!
- We have less than 40 days of school left so please make the most of it! Make sure students are prepared for the Ga Milestones and you have done everything possible to ensure they have mastered the standards. Thanks so much for all of your hard work!!!
Staff Shout Outs
- Thank you to Ms. Thatcher and Ms. Pitts for working on their unexpected off day last Friday.
Week of April 10-15
Tuesday, 4/11
- CFC soccer-2:45
- School council-5PM
- PTA board meeting-6:30
- Zumba-6:30 (free to all staff members)
- 4th grade field trip-9AM
- Mandatory faculty meeting for all staff-3PM-media center
- Kilometer Kids
- Prek & K field trip
- Accommodations meeting-3PM-media center
- Zumba-6:30 (free for all staff members)
- Spring individual school pictures
- Kilometer Kids
- Zumba-9:30 (free for all staff members)
An Ambitious Kindergarten Science Curriculum
In this article in Elementary School Journal, Tanya Wright and Amelia Wenk Gotwals (Michigan State University) say that science is being neglected in many primary-grade classrooms. One recent study found that kindergarten students are getting an average of only 2.3 minutes a day of science instruction, and 1.6 minutes of teachers reading aloud from informational texts. This paucity of science and information-based literacy content is especially prevalent in schools serving low-income students. Skimping on science and informational texts may be a product of test-prep anxiety as students gear up for high-stakes tests later in elementary schools or the time-honored theory that students should learn to read before reading to learn. It’s not surprising that by fourth grade, U.S. students do poorly on NAEP science assessments and demonstrate better comprehension on literary than informational texts.
Wright and Gotwals believe students in the primary grades can and should learn science content in line with the Next Generation science standards. They conducted a study to see if a rigorous curriculum would be help kindergarten students learn to share observations, describe patterns, ask questions, and construct an argument supported by evidence. They used the SOLID Start curriculum (Science, Oral Language, and Literacy Development from the Start of School) with 147 students in high-poverty schools, with the following key components:
• Ask – In each lesson the teacher poses a “driving question” to guide students in collecting real-world evidence and spark discussion – for example, What is wind?
• Explore – Children delve into science phenomena through dramatic play and other activities – for example, children blow air through straws and catch air in plastic bags. The teacher asks students questions like, Can you make faster and slower wind? Is there another way you can make air move with these materials?
• Read – Teachers do interactive read-alouds with an informational trade book each day to build students’ vocabulary, expose them to science words and phrases, and spark discussions on the driving question. In the wind lesson, the teacher might read from Vicki Cobb’s book, I Face the Wind and introduce words like wind, air, force, blow/blowing/blows, flutter, weather conditions, strong/stronger, slant.
• Discuss – Teachers support discussion and scaffold students in answering the driving question with scientific explanations including claims and evidence from their investigation and the read-aloud text. Teacher prompts might include, What is wind? What did you learn today that helps you answer this question? What evidence did you find in the book we read? What did you observe during your exploration?
• Draw and write – The SOLID curriculum gets students writing and drawing about their observations and questions through interactive writing on an easel and in their science journals. Categories include Our Questions, Our Claims, and Our Evidence.
The first iteration of the curriculum got promising results, but there was quite a lot of pushback from teachers, the main concern being how to get students engaged in appropriate science talk:
- Some teachers said they themselves weren’t very comfortable with science vocabulary and concepts.
- Teachers said the science trade books suggested by the researchers were too challenging for kindergarten.
- Teachers asked for more structure in the writing tasks – e.g., lines to write on, boxes to draw in when comparing two observations.
- Teachers wanted more active and multimodal activities, for example, having students move their bodies to show calm, breezy, and windy conditions or miming different thermometer readings.
These concerns led the researchers to provide more structure and guidance for teachers and make a number of other tweaks in the curriculum. A second implementation of the SOLID curriculum produced better results – students’ science learning and sophistication increased substantially with each four-week unit, and they substantially outperformed peers in a control group.
Why the significant gains? One factor was that teachers devoted more time to science instruction, but Wright and Gotwals believe student learning improved because of the intriguing SOLID content and the pedagogy used to teach it. “Our observational and interview data indicate that kindergarteners were capable of, engaged in, and so excited about science that they began to talk about ideas from science instruction beyond science lessons,” say the authors. “Teachers’ descriptions suggest that even children who typically struggle in their classrooms (e.g., a child who works with a learning specialist, a child who is learning English) were active participants in this curriculum.” They learned vocabulary like energy, herbivore, and consumer and talked about science with family members when they got home. An additional reason for the success of the curriculum was the researchers’ willingness to make significant modifications to the curriculum in response to teachers’ feedback.
“Supporting Kindergarteners’ Science Talk in the Context of an Integrated Science and Disciplinary Literacy Curriculum” by Tanya Wright and Amelia Wenk Gotwals in Elementary School Journal, March 2017 (Vol. 117, #3, p. 513-537), no e-link available. The authors can be reached at tswright@msu.edu and gotwals@msu.edu.