Making it All Come Together

Educators in an elementary school realized that students in 5th grade had to understand science concepts, perform well on state and national tests, without having completely understanding sc... See More

Educators in an elementary school realized that students in 5th grade had to understand science concepts, perform well on state and national tests, without having completely understanding science concepts that may or may not have been acquired during grades K-4th grade. Teachers During the school year, the teachers in different grades co planned and co-taught a fifth-grade classroom, as a part of the regular work of the science study group. The article outlines what they did and learned teaching a unit on plants.

Reconnecting Standards to Student Learning

This article showed how one teacher, with the help of a university professional development program, identified students’ misconceptions about food chains and plant growth and development in... See More

This article showed how one teacher, with the help of a university professional development program, identified students’ misconceptions about food chains and plant growth and development in a fifth grade classroom. In the process, a mismatch was uncovered that existed between that state’s science standards and the national science standards for K-4th grade life science. With the New Generation Science Standards (NGSS) going through its first public draft (as of May 18, 2012), one can only hope that states will come onboard so that these kinds of disconnects will be things of the past. From a pretest that this 5th grade teacher administered, she discovered that here students were not ready to learn about photosynthesis yet, since they still didn’t understand that plants were producers in a food chain or how plants functioned and reproduced. The process used to uncover and reteach science concepts that should have been learned in previous years is provided in detail. It is an excellent article for elementary teachers to read if they are wondering how to begin a unit on plants.