Our Science Classroom this Year

Inside: What Happens in Science Class. Our science standards. How I will report progress. Science letter to parents.

Learning by doing opens up new worlds.
(I took this photo in Valparaiso, Chile.)

What Happens in Science Class
I don't want science to be just memorizing terms and facts; I do want our time in science class to be a process of asking questions, creating and testing models, consulting texts, gathering data, and revising models and explanations of why things happen in this big ol' world we inhabit.

That means we won't spend a lot of time reading a science textbook and filling in worksheets. Rather, we'll be doing as much of the work of a scientist as we can. We'll begin our units with some exploration of real-world phenomena through observation and question-asking. Then, we'll conduct investigations to learn more. Finally, we'll learn science vocabulary and content to help us with our explanations and arguments from the evidence we gather.

Much of what we do won't be easy to make up outside class, so class attendance is pretty important. I do have a digital class notebook that students can access to "catch up" on the notes that we took during the time they missed. I encourage students to look over those notes and view any videos and read any readings that they missed. These are linked in the notebook. I will post the notebook on the Assignments page of our 5th-grade website.

Science Standards
This year we'll ditch the A-F grades and work on achieving the expectations of the Next Generation Science Standards, which will be implemented throughout Iowa in a couple years. I'm starting in early. :)

I've simplified the standards for reporting purposes. (See my simplified version below.) I've included several content standards and one process standard called "Science and Engineering Practices." Each learning unit will contain (at least) one of the content standards as well as the science process standard.

Reporting Progress in Science Class
As in grades K-4, the standards grading scale is 1-4:

4 = Exceeds expectations  -- Demonstrates knowledge and independence above and beyond what is expected at this time of the year.
3 = Meet expectations -- Demonstrates clear knowledge and independence in the concept or skill.
2 = Approaching expectations -- Not yet independent on this set of concepts or skills.
Some extra work needed to meet the standard.
1 = Below expectations -- Significant amount of teacher help needed.
This would become a focus area for learning. I will need to reteach these concepts or skills and the student will need to redo tests, or classwork to gain more knowledge.

Below is a photo of the standards that we'll be working on this year. Here is a  link to a document to help parents better understand the short-hand that will appear on the PowerSchool report.

Our first learning unit on our creek ecosystem explores the Ecosystems (Life Science) standard, the Energy (Life Science) standard, as well as several of the Science and Engineering Practices.

Finally, here is a letter explaining how science will happen this year!