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I think that in order to keep the students engaged and have their parents become involved you can create mini experiments for them to do at home where it requires them to be more crafty and creative rather than heavily focused on writing. Make experiments simple for parents to do from home and maybe encourage them to record and send in videos of their experiment to share to their class.

My school did lots of collaborative actiivities, where the students shared information with each other.  But we started our closure with strong family involvement, which makes a difference

I don't know your students' age range or geographic location, but activities such as comparing rainfall data and making a class map is always good.  So is tracking your personal plastics usage / usage in your neighborhood.  Some of my students used the marine tracker app (works well for land as well) and then compared that data.  Look around your community and find something that will differ slightly from place to place and have them create collaborative maps, graphs, and so on

Good luck!

Anne

I agree with the previous reply. Being that many students are at home right now with their parents or other family members this is a perfect opportunity for all of them to be engaged. I would say in addition to the friendly household experiments, to create inquiry based lessons that are catered to an at home adventure that the parents can partake in. If not the parents maybe an older sibling or other person in the household. An example of an experiment they could do together could be growing a garden or a few plants together and observing the growth while collecting data. I would also say to have clear and open communication with the parents of what you may need from them during this time.

Considering the current situation going on, i think it is very important to remain in the school routine because it is very easy to get off track especially after a long summer break. I know a lot of parents are concerned about the quality of their child's education but learning online is not necessarily a bad thing. I think educators can encourage parents to continue to be involved in their child's education through the content of science by assigning like 'at home experiments'. something that is very easy, simply and fun that students can do with their family or siblings so that they aren’t left out of their child's education. This way, parents are up to date with what their child is doing and learning. Teachers can ask and encourage their parents to participate and help their children in class activities and tasks.

I personally believe that a way to keep both parents and students involved with science and the enviroment is with little activities where they can work with together at home. Since most of the time that's how children can stay focused and actually be entertained, hands-on expereiments will allow themto be excited to want to work with and they will want to include their parents. For example, I remember when I was in elementary one of my teachers brought caterpillars and throught the weeks we saw them all grow and become beautiful butterflies, I remember how fascinating that was for us. This in my opinion can be a fun project for students to do with there parents at home, they will both be able to see how the caterpiller turns into a butterfly. That will forsure excite the student and they'll love to involve their parents in the experience.