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I find it very frustrating when the next lesson plan i must create has no text book. What do you as teachers do when you dont have the resources?

Hi Treena, I can relate! I teach one section of Science and it's a combination 7/8 class. No real text or pacing guide to follow, either. And since I'm only teaching one section of science, I don't really show up on the Science Dept's radar. My suggestion would be to track down a teacher with a book and ask for 1 copy. Then make copies of chapters for students to use. If you have many classes, maybe just make a class set so you don't have to use so much paper. This is exactly what I do and it works great. Then, depending on the topic of study, I supplement with worksheets, lessons I find online, and other relevant activities. If you can't find a teacher to lend you a book, maybe you can find an adequate text online for cheap. (Would be out of pocket expense, sorry...) I love the website www.half.com! Buy lots of books there and find great deals. You can also sell your books there too. I don't know if that advice will work for you and your specific situation, but it has worked out really well for me so I thought I'd share. The internet has become my best friend as there are TONS of free ideas, worksheets, etc. Also, NSTA is proving to be a great resource, too. I hope this advice helps and just remember, even as new teachers we are smarter than our students...so don't let them see you sweat and you'll be fine! Good luck in finding a text! Christine

Thank u for the reply. That is kind of what I do. I have made copies for my students as a class set. It's just really IRRATATING when I have I search the Internet for material just so I can teach. I am finding that it takes up a lot of time away from other things ...just to hunt down material. Frustrated teacher.

I rarely use the book at all...our book sucks. I really follow the curriculum map for guidance and create power points as I go along. If you talk to most text book companies they will send you a pre-view copy for free as well...I have a bunch of chem books if you really need one :)

What level are you teaching? I know that it is more work (initially) but setting up some high quality lab experiences (directed by your state standards) and then adapting existing online resources to your needs could serve you well. Have you tried any of these? MIT Opencourseware - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/chemistry/index.htm Learn Chemistry - http://www.rsc.org/learn-chemistry A variety of digital texts - http://www.chem1.com/chemed/digtexts.shtml Teaching Secondary Chemistry Resources - https://camtools.cam.ac.uk/wiki/site/~kst24/teaching-secondary-chemistry-resources.html Someone else also suggested purchasing used text books from sites like Half.com. When I was teaching at a Catholic high school, I did purchase a class set of introductory level college textbooks from our local university's book store for a very low cost. These worked very well.

Treena wrote, "I find it very frustrating when the next lesson plan i must create has no text book. What do you as teachers do when you dont have the resources?" Hi Treena, I can give you the basic answer how I prepare when I don't have the resources. However, it may be more timely and helpful to you if you let the forum know more about your situation. What age level do you teach? What do content do you want to cover next? What types of lab equipment and chemicals do you have available? The first year teaching keeps you very busy, but without a teacher's edition or student textbooks it can be overwhelming. I have found the teachers that post to these forums to be lifesavers and so creative when it comes to developing lessons. Let us help you brainstorm, Ruth

I teach 8thgrade physical science.

Hi Treena, What chemistry topics have you covered as far in your class? Ruth

There is another strand in this Chemistry forum that you might find helpful entitled "VERY BASIC Chemistry Lesson Ideas?" You might get some ideas there.

Treena,

Have you looked at the American Chemical Society's Middle School Chemistry site? It has some really great chemistry lesson plans that would be perfect (in my opinion) for your physical science course. Another place you might look is ChemMatters Magazine.

Many teachers are now flipping their classes, and often use a combination of videos and simulations, as well as other online materials. If you are committed to use a textbook, have you considered using CK-12? They have an extensive library of free materials, usually very high quality, that can be adopted, and printed, if necessary. You can also create custom 'flexbooks' with standard chapters, and add some of your own content. Take a look at www.ck12.org.

I also don't have chemistry textbooks to work with, so I use this website a lot: http://misterguch.brinkster.net/chemfiestanew.html It has lots of labs, worksheets, and tutorials.

Treena, I was lucky to be a part of a great science department and they have provided me with a lot of resources and a sequence to follow. However, if i did not have these materials available, i would definitely talk to the other teachers in the science department. They will most likely have some materials or a sequence that they like to follow and from there you can look up resources online and match lessons and powerpoints with your state standards.

This is how it was for me when I first started teaching. What I did was use an old text of mine to help me narrow the scope of the content to what other books included then I gathered resources my students could access like websites to give them that support what I did in class to teach the concept the way I would use a book as a resource for them to refer to not my actuall class work.

First off, let me say that, I don't really find myself using the textbook with my lessons, I mostly focus on the standards that need to be covered. But I do use the textbook as a reinforcement material for the other resources I use, for example, http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/category/chemistry, I use this simulation website for common concepts in chemistry. For example, talking about the gas laws, there is this simulation called balloons and bouncy, I use this because it shows common gas properties in a safe and visual way. You can also use the videos for students to explore or reinforce concepts. Students have liked being the one in control on playing with the videos. But then you do have to talk about the parts of the simulation or use as a post-lesson assessment.

Here is one of the best sources I have for chemistry presentations. I went to a conference and they gave me a disc and things got a lot easier... ppts, worksheets, labs, etc included. I take slides from this source or just hide slides as I go. I understand that paid for the materials to be developed through a grant and part of the grant was that it needed to be shared... www.unit5.org/chemistry was the site. You may need to contact [email protected] directly as there was an issue with the site request option. Send for the disc! It covers the major topics in chemistry and I think their is one for Biology now.

I have text books but choose not to use them because the kids don't seem to enjoy it much. The way I set up the structure for the year is to chunk different standards into different units and then chunk each unit down into specific learner outcomes and the create materials to support each outcome. The Internet is so easy to just plug in a topic in a search engine and pull shared materials off of the web. In addition HCPSIII has pacing guides available for structuring a year. Hope that helps

Treena, There are some great simulations at www.phet.colorado.edu just type in your topic and search simulations. Also I love to use chem4kids.com, brain pop, discover education with videos, and there are some really good videos you could down load from youtube. Our school blocks most video but you can also download a video converter and save the videos to a jump drive. One last thing, a teacher at our school asked publishers for a sample teacher book, student book, and workbook for a new class where she had no resources. Several of them sent her the materials and she makes copies for her students. It's worth a try. Good Luck!!

Hi I know this is late , but what I use is the FLINN BIOFAX curriculums. It's a great tool to use if you don't have up to date books. Nate Raynor

I'm mostly through my 8th year of teaching, and I don't use a text book in Physics or Chemistry anymore. It is hard at first to come up with a coherent set of plans and resources. I am still putting together a year long collection of notes, activities, and resources for Physics. PhET is good, science 360 has short videos, http://misterguch.brinkster.net/explains2.html has good problems and info for chemistry. Forums like this have great things also.

While it can be more challenging to do teach with out a book, I found it kind of liberating. I found many texts and documents that I like more then the books I have now. As I move to a more flipped classroom I will probably go back to those texts since I won't need to print them as much as I use to. As long as some of the texts the students are reading are like a text book I feel you still prepare students for what they have to do.

Hi Treena-
Sometimes you get lucky and find a resource that you can build a lesson around.
In Atomic Theory and the Periodic Table, I found a great resoource in the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. A Pulitzer Prize-winner, it read like a novel.
In my new book, which was aimed at folks exactly like you, I describe that whole lesson, as well as how I ultimately taught stoichiometry, and the Unified Gas Law.
You should find the book helpful, I hope. Notes to a New Teacher is described extensively at the website chalkdustmemories.com.
Dana Dunnan

Hi Treena,
I am excited to try some of the great resources and ideas already mentioned by others in this discussion thread. Thank you for asking the question. I just did a search in the NSTA Learning Center and discovered several resources there that may be of help to you. One is called Teaching Chemistry with Toys. It is for K- 9th grades. Also there are at least a couple of archived (free) webinars on FREE Chemistry resources through the American Chemical Society. One webinar is called: Archive: Chemical Change - Introducing a Free Online Resource for Middle School Chemistry, May 20, 2013
Another is called: Archive: The Periodic Table and Bonding - Introducing a Free Online Resource for Middle School Chemistry, January 17, 2013
AND another is called: Archive: The Water Molecule and Dissolving - Introducing a Free Online Resource for Middle School Chemistry, March 18, 2013
If you do an advanced search in the NSTA Learning Center using the keyword 'chemistry' and filtering for middle school, over 200 resources will pop up.
Hope this helps and good luck in your endeavors to find and design your chemistry curriculum without a book to guide you. Sometimes having no book opens up greater possibilities :-)
Carolyn

Have any of you used resources from the Royal Society

I was just listening to the Kitchen Chemistry podcast
There are Learn Chemistry Lectures here

Find out how the success of the synthetic organic fungicide azoxystrobin showcases the importance of organic chemistry to global food production with this article from Education in Chemistry
RCS chem net has a series of student inspired blogs

Hi Treena, There have been a lot of excellent resources shared in this thread after your initial request. We would love to hear how you are doing and what has worked for you since your initial post in February. Please let us know how things are going for you and your students. Our Best, Carolyn

Great topic! It is nice to see that I am not the only one. :) The educators shared some really good links. I was lucky enough to have my teacher's edition. So, I create my classes and share on my class blog. I know it is time consuming for educators but kids love it. The class became even more engaging.

There is a wealth of great resources in this thread. As others (Adah, Chris) have noted many of us are "textbook" liberated. I would venture to guess that those of us who are are also also experienced educators with deep content and pedagogical experience. It can be hard to take the plunge as a brand new teacher. I would suggest starting with your curriculum scope and sequence. From there think about what you want students to be able to do to demonstrate their meeting learning goals and design your lessons using some of the resources listed here. The ACS is especially useful in that one can find complete lesson plans and even teacher notes documenting the experience of others who have used these lessons. The same is true of the RSC resources.

Hi Treena and Everyone who has contributed to this thread! I am amazed at all of the wonderful resources that have been shared to help teach chemistry concepts here. I wanted to mention the SciPacks and Science Objects in our NSTA Learning Center as well. The science objects are free, and the animations are stand alone and can be used in the classroom. The SciPacks contain important pedagogical information that will help teachers isolate potential misconceptions for the concept(s) they are teaching. Great additional resources for teaching chemistry! Carolyn

In future classrooms, I will not use texts from textbook to prepare lessons for the class. Instead, I'll create engaging activity that follows through the school's curriculum. Videos are also great resources!

Also, the link from Ashley is a great start. Enjoy!

Treena-- When I began teaching in my district, I felt the same way. I was trained differently. Over time, however, I adjusted. I learned to collaborate with my colleagues in the building and around the country AND teach to the standards. Now, I feel that I am a lot better than I would have been had I relied so heavily on a text. All the best, Naomi Beverly

Thanks for the great resources!

Great resources!!

ck12.org You can take pieces of content and shape your own online textbook from them. Free Definitely worth a peek.

Hello everyone. I just wanted to share a good website for lesson plans and activities already constructed and available to teachers, including unit plans. Just google teachers pay teachers and for a fee you can purchase lesson plans from $1.00 up to $4.00. Some of them are free. Just thought I share

When you do not have a text book, you can research the topic you are going to teach and narrow it down to exactly what you want to teach. Then from there you can look up a video to use as an engagement to get the students hooked on learning about the topic. Then you could find something to allow the students to explore with or have them show you what they know about the topic by having them do some kind of simple activity that you can find online about the topic being taught. Once you find out what they know you could explain the reasoning behind why what they know is true or false by modeling some sort of experiment that shows/proves what you are saying to be true. Once you have modeled an experiment that can be found online, use the experiment that you modeled and allow the students to do the same so they have hands-on experience and the knowledge sticks with them since they are now performing the experiment. Lastly, you could come up with a creative way to evaluate what they learned. There are lots of ideas you can find online such as videos, activities, lab experiments, maybe you could even search for stuff on Pinterest. A book is not necessary to create a lesson, it helps to have one, but if one is not available there are definitely many other options to choose from so that your lesson/ experiment goes well. I hope this helped a little! -Jasmine

Hi Treena! Like Kara mentioned above, I also find BrainPOP to be helpful. It can be used at the beginning of a lesson to engage students as well as at the end of the lesson to review what we learned for the day. They also come with mini Pop quizzes that can be used for students to check what they learned. Activities and games are also included! Another website that I find really helpful is teachingchannel.org. This website provides ideas for teaching as well as resources such as activity sheets and sometimes PowerPoint to go along with the lesson.

Well I am a student teacher at University of Houston and the way I do it when I don't have textbook I look at the science TEKS and that gives me an idea. or if that does not work I ask other teachers in my grade level to see what lesson plans.

There are plenty of website you can visit to get ideas of lesson without a book.

When I was first teaching there was no such thing as the Internet and the book we had was awful! I found some other textbooks at the public library and was able to use them with the state objectives to design my lessons. Good luck!

Some great ideas that everyone has posted. When I began teaching, our 4th grade team had to write units for social studies and science. Then we would sit as a team and review the units deciding what could be added/deleted to fit our standards a little better. I hated it at the time (I was also working on my masters) but that experience has stayed with me. Textbooks are out of date and are very rigid. There are thousands of online ideas and lessons that are up to date and give that inquiry component that you don't find in the texts. We have reading, math books, and science kits, but that are resources only. Last year I taught an ebola unit integrating reading, science, math, social studies, writing, and technology to third graders. We had Socratic Seminars that were amazing and this was 3rd grade. THEY were researching, discussing, and problem solving. (Even though some students still felt that people got ebola from the ocean! Go out on a limb...this is what is best for students. I also taught 7th/8th graders in Texas that failed the TAAS test in reading. There were no materials but I could certainly make copies of articles from newspapers that drew their interest. We has "scavenger hunts" to look for information and read poetry with emotion. Take this advantage and fly with it!

I'm trying to help new teachers with this very problem--how to create curriculum on your own. If you go to: http://fornewscienceteachers.blogspot.com/ and start from the first (bottom) post, it takes you through the process of designing the curriculum for the year from scratch!

I've been using DocentEDU to turn news articles, online textbooks like CK-12, and my published google docs into complete lessons. It lets you add questions, discussions, notes, videos, and more to almost any website. Here's a lesson I made on the scientific method https://docentedu.com/beta/share/9110ey5z

I found the suggestions here extremely helpful. It is sometimes difficult to create lessons without a textbook.

Awesome, I really enjoyed reading about this. Was extremely helpful for my pre-service. 

Hi Treena,  It can be difficult to come up with lessons on the spot. I have attached below the link to the YouTube channel that I have been developing. It has hundreds of free science demonstrations. These video demonstrations cover a variety of topics that young learners should know. They are NGSS aligned and can easily be integrated into the classroom or at home. We add new video demos regularly and in the coming year we will additionally be posting resources such as worksheets, math problems, science poems, and more. Check it out and subscribe to our channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/funsciencedemos Best, Dr. George Mehler Ed.D., Temple University 

Hi Treena, Don't ever feel lost because there isn't a textbook to teach from. There are so many lessons online that you can modify to fit the needs of your student. You can check the standards for your specific grade level on online so from there you can research different lessons and adapt it to your classroom! I really good website that you could use is betterlesson.com. The majority if not all are aligned with New Generation Science Standards. Hope this helps!

When I was looking for science lessons that could align with the NGSS standards I went on lesson planet. There were some great ideas for interactive lessons that my students would love. 

I would use some online resources. You can find articles or sample lesson plans you can adapt to fit your classroom.

When you cannot get a hold on textbooks to teach your lesson, always looking at websites for ideas is a great place. You can go on better lesson plans which is a great website that aligns with the NGSS standards. There are plenty of websites that are good for teaching science, but you might have to change it up to fit your material. 

When you don't have a textbook to create lesson plans with, there are many resources on the Internet that you can use that can help. You can search up science-centered websites, Lesson Planet, Teachers Pay Teachers, and even Pinterest. The only thing about Teachers Pay Teachers and especially Pinterest is that there are ideas that are great and also not so great, so you would have to filter through them.

When you don't have a textbook to create lesson plans with, there are many resources on the Internet that you can use that can help. You can search up science-centered websites, Lesson Planet, Teachers Pay Teachers, and even Pinterest. The only thing about Teachers Pay Teachers and especially Pinterest is that there are ideas that are great and also not so great, so you would have to filter through them.