Science

SNAP has developed three types of assessments to model each component of our system of assessments

The assessments are developed for NGSS Performance Expectations (PEs) in Physical Science, Earth & Space Science, Life Science, and Engineering

They offer short-response items, short performance assessments, and instructionally-embedded assessments.

Click HERE to access the site.

Click HERE to access Actively Learn

Click HERE to access the teacher overview video that will explain Actively Learn

Texts (and videos!) for ELA, Science, and Social Studies with scaffolds and higher-order questions

Find what you teach and great texts & videos to pair with it. Or add anything you like. Take whole class, small group, jigsaw, close reads, and more to the next level.

Text-to-Speech

Dictionary

Translation

Chunking

Scaffolding

Annotation

Discussion

Formative Assessment

Metacognition

Media

From Actively Learn's Blog:

Today’s English Language Arts teachers are tasked with creating a curriculum that not only meets Common Core and state standards but also engages students in class and prepares them for higher education and careers. They’re told that a curriculum should improve students’ foundational skills, teach close reading of complex texts, and include a volume of reading sufficient for vocabulary and knowledge building. All too often, though, teachers have little training or support in designing a high-quality curriculum, and many ask their students questions that don’t require close reading or citing examples from the text as evidence. Research shows that more than half of teachers spend five or more hours searching the internet, often outside of school hours, to plan lessons for their curriculum. Mandates, such as state standards, high-stakes tests, and prescribed curricula, may lead teachers to feel that they are not serving students in a satisfactory and effective way (Costigan, 2017).

A well-structured curriculum, however, can satisfy all these learning goals: engagement, skill building, knowledge building, deeper learning, and preparation for the kinds of rigorous work expected in higher education, careers, and life. Here are clear guidelines on how to build the best ELA curriculum for your students.‍

1. Create a unit that relates to students’ lives and explores complicated topics in a safe space. ‍

A good place to start is to explore a topic that is central to your students’ identities. A unit on immigrants who are finding their place in their new home, for example, can speak to not only immigrants in your classroom, but also to students whose family members are immigrants. Essential questions can create even more bridges into the content: by asking broad questions about the relationships between protagonists in these stories, students can connect the literature to their own family dynamics and friendships.

In addition, don’t be afraid to take risks with your topics. Exploring darker or more complex themes can resonate with your students in a deeply personal way. Students are drawn to the dark topics explored in contemporary young adult literature such as The Hate U Give, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Walk Two Moons, and The Fault in Our Stars. Connecting with a character’s struggles can help students learn about themselves, other people, and the larger world, and discussing a character’s survival after a traumatic experience can help them discover and articulate how to best move forward in their own lives. Complex themes like conflict, love, and grief are the stuff that literature, and life, are made of. By treating these topics with sensitivity, you can create a safe space for students to better understand their own reactions, reflect on their own difficult experiences, and learn how to talk about sensitive topics with compassion and respect. ‍

2. Assemble a collection of related texts featuring a variety of genres, authors, and perspectives.‍

Curricular units provide a great opportunity to teach students how to connect diverse texts and perspectives. Not only is this a big push from the Common Core, but it’s also good practice to develop the sort of analytical, comparative thinking they will need to evaluate sources and understand diverse perspectives in a hyperconnected world. A thoughtful curricular unit on teen bullying, for example, can feature excerpts from The Outsiders and Black Boy, a short story by Stephen Crane, poems by Maya Angelou and D.H. Lawrence, a recent article analyzing research on the physiological and emotional effects of cyberbullying, and a video describing firsthand experiences of being bullied. Choosing an engaging, diverse collection of texts from authors of different backgrounds, and featuring a variety of protagonists, will draw students into the stories and resonate with them throughout the course. What’s more, asking students to integrate nonfiction texts in their reading, thinking, and writing about works of fiction encourages them to make sophisticated comparisons of how genres differ and builds background knowledge that leads to deeper understanding of the literary texts. ‍

3. Guide students’ learning with a series of essential questions.‍

You can engage students from the beginning to the end of a unit with essential questions that are broad and universal, bring structure, and connect a variety of texts. In our unit on slavery, for example, we feature 21 fiction and nonfiction texts that we connect with a series of four guiding questions. We start our unit by asking one topical essential question: What were the relationships between enslavers and the enslaved like? This question—which is open-ended and engaging, invites higher-order thinking, and requires justification and explanation—guides the thinking and discussion for two short stories and a firsthand account by Frederick Douglass.

The unit’s next three sections feature a series of texts guided by more essential questions: Why is it important to read firsthand accounts of slavery? What did escaping slavery look like? What did culture and innovation look like to enslaved people? By answering these questions as they explore a series of texts, students build on their knowledge throughout the unit by reading, thinking, and writing about complex ideas and develop a deepening understanding of the effects of slavery on individuals and the larger world.‍

Use essential questions to engage your students, bring structure to your ELA curriculum unit, and connect a series of texts.

4. Choose rigorous content and use instruction that prompts students to look more deeply into the text.‍

Including a combination of complex literary texts, articles, and primary sources in your unit can better prepare students for the demands of higher education, careers, and life. Students will be expected to grapple with rigorous texts on their standardized tests, in their college courses, and in their future workplaces. Exposing them to complex syntax and structure, challenging vocabulary, and unfamiliar content will help them develop the reading and analytical skills they will need to grapple with legal documents, tax forms, and many other complex texts they will encounter as adults. Remember that challenging students with “frustration-level texts” (Morgan, Wilcox, and Eldredge, 2010) has been shown to increase reading gains, especially in poor readers. Texts that have more subtlety and depth inspire deeper thinking, analysis, and conversations—exactly the kind of activities students need to succeed in higher education, careers, and life.

For each unit, it’s important to ask students to dig deeply into their analysis. Helping them learn to carefully read, and reread, a poem or challenging text before answering your questions can lead them to access deeper layers of meaning. You can also ask them to compare and contrast two complex texts, analyze a chart that illustrates the unit’s theme, or describe how a related video illuminates or complicates an issue. To help struggling readers deeply understand complex text and participate more fully in group discussions, you can scaffold by providing definitions of key words and establishing context with brief background information. ‍

5. Ask text-dependent questions. ‍

The Common Core and state standards for ELA stress the importance of teaching students how to use evidence to support their thinking. In assigning writing assignments and research projects based on complex texts, ask questions that do more than require students to articulate their opinions and draw from their own personal experiences. Instead, ask them to answer a question using evidence from the assigned texts to make their points.

If you’re not sure whether your question is text-dependent, use this rule of thumb: if you can answer without having read the text, it’s not text-dependent. And if students answer the question without citing evidence to support their claims, challenge them to go back into the text to find examples. For example, let’s say that you’re reading “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” If you ask students a generic question about how individuals experience reality differently, you’ll probably get a wide range of tangents and musings. But if you ask them a text-dependent question like, “How does Walter’s view of reality impact his actions and relationships?” you can expect students to refer back to the text and be challenged to find evidence to support their answers. Another approach is to give them a sentence starter, such as “When Walter Mitty ____, it shows ___because _____.” Continually asking them to write evidence-based answers in short-answer questions will pay off when they’re asked to create longer essays and research projects that require the use of evidence to support multiple claims. Asking text-dependent questions throughout your unit can also help your students focus as they read, build knowledge, and deepen their thinking on topics that they hear about or experience every day, such as the natural world, technology, and violence.

At the end of the unit, your students will walk away with new information that is closely connected to their lives and be more skilled in thinking and writing about complex ideas, analyzing rigorous content, making meaningful connections between a variety of texts, using evidence to support their claims, and discussing sensitive topics. Your thoughtfully constructed units will help your students become better consumers of information, make better judgments, and be stronger readers and thinkers as they take on the challenges of the future.

RELATED:

Quick Guide to Topical Essential Questions

Latest Research Recommends Changes to ELA Instruction

5 Ways to Make Rigorous Content Motivating to Students

Choose the science area and see a visual dictionary of terms and theories. Click HERE to access the site.

CHECK THIS ONE OUT! AWESOME IDEAS!

From Eric Curts:

Click HERE for the latest resources, news, blog posts, links, and other helpful technology integration items. New resources will be added to the top, grouped by month, so you can scroll down to view previously added information.

Looking for ideas on how to make a choice board for your high school science class? Click HERE for ideas.

31 Ways to Bring Lunar Science into Your Classroom

The Moon is a constant celestial companion in classrooms around the world. Lunar phenomena has much to offer teachers as both an engaging narrative and visible presence in the sky that students have personally experienced.

NASA Planetary Geologist and Space Educator, Andrea Jones, knows firsthand the opportunities that the Moon holds for teachers. “Right now, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo program. We have an international fleet of robotic lunar explorers that are reshaping what we thought we knew about the Moon. And, we are preparing to return, with people. It’s a great time for the Moon, and a great time to bring the Moon into every classroom!”

Take your Students on Virtual Field Trips

Find a curated list of media-rich and interactive resources from PBS LearningMediaand NASA—there’s something for every K-12 teacher. Use these resources as a tool for modeling, visualization, discussion, scaffolding, and data collection and analysis. Whether your students have never heard about the Apollo missions, or you happen to have a picture of the Moon somewhere on your classroom wall, consider bringing some of these Moon themes and connections into your instruction!

Great ideas from Matt Miller's Ditch That Textbook blog!

With the introduction of new standards across different content areas, the focus of learning has moved beyond simply mastering content knowledge to applying skills within disciplines. The Next Generation Science Standards is an example fo this. It contains 8 different science practices across all grade levels k-12.

They are:

• Asking questions and defining problems

• Developing and using models

• Planning and carrying out investigations

• Analyzing and interpreting data

• Using mathematics and computational thinking

• Constructing explanations and designing solutions

• Engaging in argument from evidence

• Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information

Some schools will see this and think, “We don’t have enough science equipment for this!” You may already have all you need with devices your students have access to. And this goes for any content area with evolving standards — English, math, social studies and beyond.

We have converted our lab reports from Google Docs into Google Slides. It has opened up new possibilities for learners to demonstrate many of the NGSS science practices.

Here are three examples you can start using in your classroom now:

Example 1: Developing and Using Models

When looking at models in the science classroom, we are looking at representations or a system or part of a system. Imagine students are being asked to create a model explaining how a Cartesian Diver, as seen below, works.

Original: On a traditional worksheet, a question like this would have space below for students to create a model using drawings and text.

Better: The same situation can be created within a Google Doc by inserting a Google Drawing.

Transformational: In Slides, we can allow learners to take this even further.

• Students can embed audio to provide an explanation for what they are thinking or even link an audio file describing a visual they created.

• The same is true for video. Students can embed a video directly onto a slide. This video could be as simple as a direct address to the camera or more advanced like a physical demonstration of a process.

The point is that the ability for more avenues of expression allows learners to choose a path of communication with the least barriers.

Example 2: Planning and Carrying Out Investigations

Think of a traditional science procedure on a worksheet. I’ll bet you are thinking of a list numbered steps for students to follow.

With Google Slides, we have the ability to go way beyond this.

Instead, embed videos on a slide. Teachers can present procedures to students as short videos. You can record with your camera or use a tool like Flipgrid (flipgrid.com) or Screencastify (screencastify.com) or others.

These videos make directions crystal clear. Students can pause, rewind, and review. They don’t even have to raise their hand to ask for help.

In the example above, the teacher created instructional videos. Students can make these videos, too!

We can skip having students create a numbered written procedure. Try student-created video. This could be a full-blown live procedure walkthrough. It could something simpler: a direct video address to camera simply explaining the step-by-step procedure for the lab.

Example 3: Analyzing and Interpreting Data

Ask students to analyze data. They determine the meaning of data. They look for patterns. Then, traditionally, they write about their findings.

Google Slides lets students go beyond just writing. They can show what they’ve learned by annotating their data presentations.

With text boxes, shapes, audio, video, images and more, there are limitless possibilities!

Imagine students took photos of a lab. They could easily insert that image into a slide. Draw on top of that image. Add text boxes or audio explanations.

This works great for graphs as well. Students can use the drawing tools to explain exactly what is happening in the graph.

Using Google Slides may not fundamentally change the science practices in an activity. But, Slides provides new ways to demonstrate mastery.

In addition to scaffolding for those who need it, its richer multimedia can provide greater student challenge.

20 Online Resources for Fantastic Free Science Videos

Because seeing is believing, especially when it comes to science.

On an interactive map, see earthquakes and their magnitude around the world. The program will show the location, magnitude, and how many people felt the tremor. You can view by day, week, and month. Click HERE to access the program.