Inspired Teacher
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Why is science so cool in school?
There was the science room in elementary school where we could touch frogs and taxidermied skunks. There was Mrs. Stemler's dissection of a pig uterus in middle school. And all of my most potent high school memories come from biology, chemistry, and physics.
This has prompted me to wonder, why is science so cool in school?
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How can I bring more science to my teaching?
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Do you remember learning about the scientific method when you were in school? If you learned nothing in science class you usually still had to memorize the specific steps scientists go through in imagining, crafting, executing, and reflecting on an experiment.
The steps go something like this:
- Ask a Question
- Do Background Research
- Construct a Hypothesis
- Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
- Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
- Communicate Your Results
Step outside the science context for a minute and look at those 6 steps. Do they seem familiar? These are probably the same steps you've been going through all year as you try to find the best ways to reach your students.
- You try to figure out why they're struggling with a particular concept.
- You research new methods of teaching this concept.
- You come up with a strategy that you think might do the trick.
- You test it out on the class.
- You look at the results hoping to see improvement.
- You use your conclusion to determine immediate next steps.
These are the steps one takes when confronted with problems that need to be solved. What a valuable process to learn!
Whether you're a full-time science teacher, an elementary school everything-teacher, or even if you teach a subject besides science, giving students a chance to dabble in the scientific method can be incredibly valuable. At this point in the school year you may not feel up to the challenge of turning your classroom into an experimental laboratory. But this week we have some suggestions for how you can get your students to do the work:
- Students can devise their own simple experiments using common materials they can find at home or around the school.
- Students can think of an everyday problem and create an invention that can solve it. Consider having them research and even go through the patenting process for their invention.
- Students can research a problem that scientists have taken through the scientific method and create a short presentation about the steps the scientists took to make their discoveries. They can then teach the rest of the class about the topic they researched (and ideally perform a small experiment similar to what they researched.)
If you don't teach science you can still do variations on the activities described above. Each will require skills from a variety of disciplines including but not limited to math, writing, and reading.
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Students: Design your own experiments.
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Once you've taught about the scientific method - and ideally after you've spent months practicing it through class experiments - why not let your students come up with their own questions, hypotheses, and experiments? Who knows what they might discover? Click here for a complete description of the activity. |
Students: Make your own inventions.
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If you want to try having your students create their own inventions, the following sites may provide some useful help.
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| Teacher Resources |
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Science Buddies
A resource for science fair projects, experiments, etc.
National Science Teachers Association
Full access to the resources on this site requires registration but there are still great articles to download, contests to enter, materials to purchase, and journals to read for free.
Science Experiments for Kids
This site for homeschoolers lists a wide variety of websites with cheap, easy, and effective experiments. This is a good place for students to go to find an experiment they want to try, or for you to find one that would not be too complicated to do with your whole class.
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