Transitional Kindergarten
observing nature
NGSS FOSS curriculum for our youngest learners includes systematic investigations of trees and their leaves, animals that make their home in leaf litter, soil and rocks around the roots, and the wood that comes from trees that will bring students to a better understanding of role of naturre at school and in the community.
Curriculum Description & Overview
The five investigations in Observing Nature use local trees through the seasons to provide students with age-appropriate experiences with life, earth, and physical science. These experiences will serve them well as they investigate these concepts in more sophisticated ways when they are in kindergarten.
Throughout this module students engage in science and engineering practices by asking questions, participating in collaborative investigations, observing, recording, and interpreting data to build explanations, and obtaining information from photographs. They have opportunities to draw and label their observations, and to share their ideas verbally with their peers and adults. Students gain experiences that expose them to the crosscutting concepts of patterns, cause and effect, and structure and function.
About Notebook Masters
To find the notebook masters, the best place to find them and print is through ThinkLink on the Clever Portal. Once you're there, navigate to Content > Course Readers > Observing Nature. Then you'll go to Module Resources > Notebook and Teacher Masters to download them by language for printing.
You'll have to add the TK Observing Nature to your favorites, so you can easily get it again. You can view a short video here to show how to find them.
200430_OB_NATURE_OVERVIEW.pdf
Accessing Resources on ThinkLink
This summer, FOSSweb is moving to a new platform. This move will guarantee you and your students more stable and reliable FOSSweb access, plus many new site features, without changing how you already teach FOSS.
You'll be able to access FOSSweb on ThinkLink beginning in the 2021-2022 school year. ThinkLink is a new curriculum platform from School Specialty, built to support easy single sign-on and class management with Clever, Google, and more.
More About Investigations
Active investigation is a master pedagogy. Embedded within active learning are a number of pedagogical elements and practices that keep active investigation vigorous and productive. In the practice of science, scientists put things together and take things apart, observe systems and interactions, and conduct experiments. This is the core of science—active, firsthand experience with objects, organisms, materials, and systems in the natural and designed worlds.
In the FOSS Program, students engage in the same processes as scientists. Students often conduct investigations in collaborative groups of four, with each student taking a role and contributing to the effort.
The active investigations in FOSS are cohesive and build on each other and the readings to lead students to a comprehensive understanding of concepts. Through the investigations, students gather meaningful data.
