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Hi, 

I am a senior at Dominican University pursuing a bachelor's in Elementary Education. I will be student teaching in the Spring but have noticed that schools don't prioritize teaching Science. What are some ideas on how to best integrate Science while teaching other subjects? I want to be able to have plenty of ideas before I start student teaching so I can share them with my future colleagues. 

Hi Denise,

I am so excited for you as you begin your teaching career with your student teaching in the Spring!

It is very ambitious and proactive of you to want to begin creating your electronic file of ideas for how to incorporate science with some of the other sujects you will be teaching in an elementary classroom.  I would like to encourage you to create an NSTA collection of resources using lesson plans and other resources you find in the NSTA learning center/library of resources.  So many of the Science and Children journal articles contain great examples of how to integrate reading, writing, and math standards/objectives with science content and science and engineering practices.  For example, this month's Science and Chidren journal there is an artilce/lesson plan on how to integrate poetry into science content at

https://www.nsta.org/science-and-children/science-and-children-novemberdecember-2021/language-science

That is just one article of probably dozens on this common core connection to writing.  Of course there are hundreds of lesson plans connecting math standards to science content and science and engineering practices.  

I hope this helps.  Let your membership and access to the NSTA journals and lesson plans help you to collect ideas now on various reading, writing, and math common core standards.  You could create separate collections for each Common Core Standard you know you will be focusing on in the grade level you will be student teaching.  Then you will have some ideas to check out when the time comes.

Sincerely,

Prof. Mohr, Dominican University, River Forest, IL

     I have found different NSTA resources to be very helpful in incorporating a multitude of subjects into one lesson. I particularly enjoyed the attached article, because it offered ways to incorporate gardens both indoors and outdoors, along with combining math with science through measurement and data of plants. Students also learn to cooperate and work with others, which could be social studies skills or SEL skills. Students can also write about their experiences in science, work together to create a science book about their discoveries, record and draw observations, or a multitude of other writing projects. When one is first considering how to merge and integrate different content disciplines, the job can look daunting, but it will allow you to reach more students and more content areas in less time. Plus, students are more interested when they are really delving into things that they are interested in.  

Attachments

Creating a Schoolyard Mini-Garden (Journal Article)

My school does not teach science to grades K-3 at the moment in order to catch them up in ELA and math.  We incorperate it into our ELA lessons.  I am teaching second grade and we use books about different science subjects (animals, enviroments, weather...)  as a way to practice reading comprehension.  We also use them to have the students do writing assignments.