Claim Evidence Reasoning Sentence Starters

These sentence starters help students coordinate evidence with their ideas as they explain the phenomenon. Students work in pairs or groups and decide which evidence from the activities best fits the idea (or claim) sentence strip they have. Each group can write a full explanation using these strips (a longer, multi-day process) or the explanation can be created as a class with each group specializing in 2 claims with coordinating evidence (and reasoning). Start out having students put the claims in order to tell the science story then add in the evidence and reasoning pieces.