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Hi Everyone!
I'm Natashia, I am currently a new student teacher for a first grade classroom. I am looking for quick, fun, and engaging activities.Sadly, the school that I am at gives teachers 15 to 20 minutes to teach science. From what I have learned this is not uncommon in schools. Schools focus a lot of the attention on reading and math. I agree that these are important, but science is very important too. Please give me any advice on how to squeeze science in at school that does not give teachers enough time to teach it? Thank you!
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Natashia,
I am a pre-service teacher and have experienced and heard a lot about the limited time science is getting in schools. This can be heart breaking for a teacher who thinks that science is so important, and for students who would love to learn how things work and experiment. However, you can include science into more parts of the day. For example, during literacy time you could read a book about science. There is a book by Dr. Seuss titled "Are You My Mother?" Kids love Dr. Seuss and this book actually has a science message about heredity and traits. Then perhaps do some writing activities about the book. There are first grade standards that include traits and heredity so this book would fit in nicely with that. Also, do they students have center time? If they do, there are so many opportunities to incorporate science through centers. If you have a block center, give the students a limited amount of space and challenge them to build the biggest tower in the space they are given. This would include some of those engineering ideas. Also a water table is a center that students find exciting, but they are actually learning about how water works as they are playing!
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Hello Natashia!
I totally understand where you are coming from. I am also student teaching this semester and I have realized that science goes on the back burner. Since we only get 15-20 minutes of science time a day, we spread out a lesson through a week's time. A 5E lesson is taught in chunks throughout a week instead of all in one day. So it is not really about trying to squeeze material in a short period of time, but more like giving students meaningful content that they will really comprehend by the end of the week. I hope this helps!
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Ana, this one way to make sure students get science everyday. Check out some of the Picture Perfect Science Lessons books. They start with a trade book and use the content to spring board into science. Sometimes you can squeeze in more science time daily through literature.
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Hi Natashia!
I am currently struggling with the same thing in my field placement. It's heartbreaking because when we are able to do science, I can see that the students absolutely love it. Seeing that being taken away from them is frustrating. So much time is spent focusing on getting the students ready for testing that time is taken away from other important subjects, and it it concerning because I do believe all subjects are equally as important not only for testing purposes but for students' knowledge of the world around them. It's hard because there is so much content that needs to be covered in math, for example, but it would be nice if someone came up with a solution to make sure that students truly get the same amount of time allotted for each subject.
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Danielle, I hear you and totally agree. Thankfully, with about 25 years of teaching experience, I have learned how to keep science in daily lessons. I don't even understand how other people can't see the math involved in science, not to mention the ELA skills, and social studies. Science is consistently over looked in elementary schools and that is one area where we could grow our scores for standardized testing. Imagine students that get excited during science because they recognize the relevancy of knowing how to measure, average, and apply math skills in real world problem solving!
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If you can find ways to integrate science into other subjects, such as math, social studies, even literacy I would try and do that. There's a lot you can do with science and math. For example right now I'm doing a weather unit for Science. We are tracking a huge snow storm that's supposed to arrive this weekend. We are making predictions about how much snow we might get total. This ties in with measurement in Math. We'll then graph our predictions and then once we get the real snow totals, we'll compare them. I can also pull books on weather for guided reading and discuss which regions of the US are more prone to severe weather..etc (tie in Social Studies).
Also are you familiar with either Mystery Science or Mystery Doug Science? The latter offers short but interesting 5 minute videos about science phenomenon. The students really enjoy them.
Here are the links:
https://mysteryscience.com/forces/forces-motion-magnetism
https://mysterydoug.com/
Hope these help!
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