Describes an idea that puts scientists to work alongside teachers in elementary school classrooms. (CCM)

Introduces Project Weather and Water with the goal of developing and testing ideas of how to implement weather topics and water physics in an integrated way. Discusses teacher preparation, implementation, and evaluation of this project. (ASK)

In the city where the authors live, located on the shore of Lake Ontario, children have ample opportunity to interact with snow. Water vapor rising from the relatively warm lake surface produces tremendous "lake effect" snowfalls when frigid winter winds blow. Snow piles along roadways after each passing storm, creating impressive snow…

Good resources for teaching elementary science content abound, making science more accessible to everyone and helping teachers enhance their presentation of science topics. However, there is one important aspect of science that sometimes proves a bit more difficult to teach: introducing students to the idea of the nature of science. Nature of…

While the sight of a spider may cause a shriek of alarm from an adult, the very same sight might evoke a squeal of delight and fascination from a child. Even "icky" and "gross" creatures can become part of great science lessons. That's the goal of "Spiderrific," a unit of the New Jersey 4-H Science Discovery Series.…

Ask any elementary teacher to discuss the obstacles they face when trying to implement inquiry-based science teaching and you?re sure to hear hands-on materials mentioned. Where to get supplies and how to pay for them, how to organize and store the materials, and how to distribute the materials efficiently during the lessons are constant…

In this article, the authors describe how they capitalized on their first-grade students' love of dinosaurs by hosting a fun-filled Dinosaur Day in their classroom. On Dinosaur Day, students rotated through four dinosaur-related learning stations that integrated science content with art, language arts, math, and history in a fun and time-efficient…

Crayfish, also known as "crawfish" or "crawdads," are easy to keep in the classroom, and with patience and luck, students will observe the complete life cycle of the crayfish. They will also learn about aquatic animals and habitats and get to conduct inquiry experiments about animal behavior. This article describes how a third-grade teacher used…

In this investigation, pairs of upper elementary students test germination percentage using seeds of Indian corn ("Zea mays"), scarlet runner beans ("Phaseolus coccineus"), and the prairie cup-plant ("Silphium perfoliatum") grown on rolled, damp paper towels. The pairs compare seeds that have been stratified, a simulation of overwintering and…

The purpose of this paper is to carefully examine the evolution of students' theory building and modeling, critical components of scientific epistemologies, over a unit of study on sinking and floating in one third/fourth grade classroom. The study described in this paper follows in the tradition of Design Experiments (Brown 1992, Collins 1990)…

One activity that gets children thinking about how electricity is made involves exploring hydro (water) power. Water has been used as a source of energy for thousands of years for mechanical purposes such as grinding corn, bellows for furnaces or sawmills for cutting wood or slate. For about a century hydro power has been producing electricity…

Since 1990 the science curriculum in Northern Ireland has gone through three major changes. In the beginning, fifteen attainment targets were introduced to an unsuspecting and largely unprepared teaching population: these were eventually reduced to five in 1993 and then to the present two in 1996. Unlike in England, technology has never stood as…

Stories and poems are the mainstay of primary education; children of all ages love them and children themselves are capable of writing very powerful material. Using poems, stories and songs in science allows children to access science from a different point of view. In this article, the author makes some suggestions and presents a list of useful…

Buntingsdale Infant School in Shropshire has installed an environmentally friendly heating system. The school's heating system is called a Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP). Buntingsdale, a three-classroom infant school in a wooden demountable building, is one of the first schools in Britain to use this system. The system is fully automatic: it is…

Local universities and other higher education establishments represent a huge potential resource for primary schools that is often untapped. The School of Chemistry at Bristol University has recently become a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), the only one in the country in chemistry. The authors' project, known as Bristol…