Creating Seemingly Unrelated Analogies Want to encourage students to find unexpected connections across content? Here's a quick framework based on the most important terms from both bits of content.
Help my students remember these confusing terms! If you want students to memorize, you can't aim for memorize. You have to aim higher – and then memorization comes along for free.
Upgrading A Research Report So many "research reports" are really just "regurgitation re-writes." Here's one way to take a research report to a much more interesting level.
Updating Old Questions: A Mere Model of a Cell Why are my best biologists just restating facts we already know?
Taking Flashcards Up To “Analyze” We had a pack of animal flashcards. But my kid can already read. So here's how we took these low-level cards up to Analyze – in three different ways.
Thinking Like Producers About Consumers Here's how I'd use ethics and multiple perspectives to get students thinking about producers, consumers, and decomposers in new and interesting ways.
Creating A New Creature We're not doing a fluffy art project here. Kids are developing a realistic, made up creature that could have actually lived in a particular biome.
Think Like An Engineer: Egg Drop At our school, 6th graders participate in an annual egg drop. To increase the rigor, I looked for unique scientific roles and came up with three: designing a parachute to slow the egg's descent, testing materials to pack inside the structure, and developing the structure itself. Each of these roles will be developed into a scientific discipline.
Climbing Bloom’s Taxonomy In Science Science should be more than memorizing facts. Let's spice it up and push our students from the doldrums of remembering to the soaring heights of evaluation. While it's true that this will take longer than just following a textbook, we're not just teaching facts, we're equipping students with the ability to make well-informed judgements.
Pop Quiz! Rock Cycle Depth and Complexity Here are a set of questions someone sent in. What do you think?
