Circuits Unit – Grade 4

Nov 12, 2016

Unit guide for the STC Circuits Kit revised to meet Next Generation Science Standards. It reframes the kit around a flashlight scenario where students gather evidence to better understand how energy transfers and transformations happen.

This draft is a starting place. Please feel free to make changes to the student tools within this file and to add or change activities based on the ideas your students bring up in class.

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“We did spend quite a bit of time talking about the talk moves, and also like what does make for a model and what doesn’t make for a model… having folks understand what makes for an explanation in science. We had a lot of clarity from the book… how do we support the students in getting toward being able to express how or why a phenomenon is happening versus what is happening… getting at those causal mechanisms, but also like, how do students revise? How do students revise models? What does that look like?… How do students give feedback to each other? How does that modeling look over time?”

– Teacher Educator

Ambitious Teaching—An overview

In this video we illustrate what Ambitious Teaching looks like in classrooms ranging from high school to kindergarten. The practices were developed through collaborations between teachers and researchers, and they are continually evolving as we learn more about how they work with young learners. There are several themes that you’ll see in all examples, such as a focus on puzzling and complex phenomena, opportunities to make sense through talk, making thinking visible, attending to who is participating, using various forms of scaffolding and tools, and much more.

This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1907471 and #1315995