Curriculum development, like many things, is a cycle. When I first started my job, we were towards the beginning of the cycle. I got to see many projects develop from an idea ("Let's write a unit for third graders about light!") all the way to a finished product ("Wow, we wrote a 600-page behemoth of a teacher's guide. Could this break someone's ( Read more... )

Kid: Hey, are you the science lady ( Read more... )

"If Canada is above us, how come we don't see it when we look up?"

Whoa.

Kid: I'm done with my scientific explanation ( Read more... )

I have just completed the first week of the research project for which I will be spending several weeks in classrooms. I am currently Somewhere In California, where I visited five schools and interviewed teachers and students. I'll write more about the whole experience in depth later, but for now you get two awesome things kids said ( Read more... )

In one of our recent studies, we posed the question: How can models help scientists understand the Solar System?One student wrote ( Read more... )

For the past few days, my colleagues and I have been attempting to encapsulate and quantify the characteristics of decent fourth grade writing into one neat 4x5 grid that fits on one sheet of paper. Needless to say, this has been an exceptionally difficult and probably ultimately futile task. However, eager undergraduates are awaiting the thrilling ( Read more... )

This morning, I asked the fourth graders in the land far, far away to write about what they had learned about objects in the Solar System. Their teacher always makes them write a minimum of a page, so, although I hadn't planned on requiring them to write all that much, they did. The problem is, this means some of them really had to stretch things ( Read more... )

Starting tomorrow, I will be testing another curriculum unit for work. This means that I will be spending time almost every day in a fourth grade classroom in a land that is a far, far BART ride away. I have to be in this faraway land at 8 AM, which sucks. But do I hope that teaching about space will prove more interesting than teaching about light ( Read more... )

Me: "No running in the halls!"
First Grader: "I'm not running. I'm power walking."