Science sparks students’ excitement and curiosity about the world! Explore research and discuss how to build your toolbox for engaging others in prioritizing phenomenon-based instruction in elementary students’ curricular experiences; go beyond special activities.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will leave with strategies to advocate for integrating science into students’ elementary classroom experiences, on par with ELA and Math.

SPEAKERS:
Yanira Vazquez

How can assessments support three dimensional sensemaking? Explore how the OpenSciEd Elementary assessment system illuminates the brilliance and strengths of students, teachers, and classroom communities as they figure out science ideas.

TAKEAWAYS:
OpenSciEd Elementary curriculum units have three-dimensional assessment opportunities woven throughout the unit. Five different assessment types work together as a system to support teachers, students, and the classroom community in responding to ideas, reflecting, and checking progress.

SPEAKERS:
Amy Belcastro, Gen Zoufal, Gail Housman

How can we design science learning that allows multilingual learners to shine? This session explores instructional approaches, and teacher moves that create rich opportunities for students to use their full range of meaning-making resources. Through classroom examples—such as building consensus ideas or sharing noticings and wonderings about puzzling phenomena—we’ll examine moments when students make their thinking public, collaborate, and grow as sensemakers.

TAKEAWAYS:
Multilingual learners are brilliant and capable of engaging in rich and rigorous scientific sensemaking when classrooms make space for their ideas. Walk away with practical tools and routines that elevate student thinking and strengthen whole-class science sensemaking.

SPEAKERS:
Susan Gomez Zwiep

In the storyline instructional approach, elementary students draw on their questions, interests, and identities to make sense of real-world phenomena and explore solutions to problems. Students see their science work as figuring out questions and problems their classroom has identified rather than learning about something their teacher asks them to learn. In this session, you will experience the process of developing questions from an anchoring phenomenon and explore videos of elementary students making progress through investigation and sensemaking discussions to develop the target science ideas and practices.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will explore how to work with students’ ideas and questions through classroom discourse, establishing a meaningful context that provides a reason to figure out science ideas and enables students to connect what they learn to what they and their communities care about.

SPEAKERS:
Brian Reiser, Gail Housman

Engage in an elementary unit and see how classroom discussions can support ALL students’ in using their ideas, experiences, and evidence for collective sensemaking.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will learn about how to engage elementary students in classroom discussion to share initial ideas, build understanding and come to consensus about the phenomenon they are trying to collectively figure out.

SPEAKERS:
Amy Belcastro, Guy Ollison

Discover how mathematics becomes a powerful tool for science sensemaking in elementary classrooms through the lens of OpenSciEd Elementary units. In this session, participants will experience how elementary age learners engage with mathematics and computational thinking and data—measurements, observations, sketches, photos, and recordings—to make sense of real-world phenomena featured in OpenSciEd investigations. We’ll explore how children notice and describe variability, create visual displays to organize their ideas, and analyze and interpret patterns to answer questions and spark new inquiries. Through an immersive experience grounded in OpenSciEd materials, participants will experience how integrating mathematics and computational thinking and data science practices into elementary science instruction deepens reasoning, supports a range of learners, and empowers children to think critically about the data they encounter every day.

TAKEAWAYS:
OpenSciEd K-5 units create rich opportunities to use math as a tool for sensemaking by exploring variability, creating data displays, and analyzing and interpreting patterns—strengthening their mathematics and computational thinking and data literacy while supporting grade-level standards.

SPEAKERS:
Guy Ollison, Amy Belcastro

How do literacy and science practices strengthen one another and what can that look like in elementary classrooms? In this session, participants will learn about key research-based principles for integrating literacy and science in elementary classrooms. We will also engage with K-5 materials from the OpenSciEd Elementary curriculum as a model for how these principles can be enacted in classrooms. This will include a review of student-facing materials, including a variety of grade-level science texts, to showcase how integrating literacy practices into science lessons enhances science and literacy learning. We will also examine teacher-facing materials and other curricular resources to understand how these tools help make the connections between science and ELA explicit. Finally, the presentation will highlight how teachers can apply these key principles into their classrooms to support young children’s sensemaking and ELA development.

TAKEAWAYS:
Integrating literacy practices within elementary science strengthens learning in both science and ELA. Participants will learn key research-based principles for integrating literacy into science time to support students’ sensemaking in science, while also building their ELA skills.

SPEAKERS:
Gail Housman, Amanda Dahl