Thank you for highlighting this important point. I agree that it is critical that as students engage in sensemaking that students egnage with the content as a collective community of learners and through that experience learn vocabulary. In my experience, the shift into sense making has been a tremendous support to our linguistically gifted students because they learn vocabulary authentically through relevant, place based experiences.  It is the meaningful and purposeful learning that happens in inquiry really allows students to develop vocabulary. The student work examples I highlighted were all students who are bilingual and learning English. They were using words like solluble and unsolluble and emulsifier.  I learned so much from them that I did not know! I am continually blown away with the vocabulary acquisition. In fact, the lack of vocbulary development prior to shifting towards content based literacy was one of the factors that lead me to science. The URL that follows is a resource I have found helpful to support classroom teachers, ELL teachers, and special education teachers to move forward understanding of the shifts in high leverage strategies to support ELL students.  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-BudIqSsSOq4DGN47cO-o6r02jUXNT0n/view?usp=sharing. In my practice, these strategies inform my instruction across all subjects. 

Truly there is so many layers to this work and vocabulary development is incredibly important as it is essential to comprehension. We also know that vocabulary sticks best when it has other related topics to stick to! Enter science! I could have talked the whole time about the report and how it represents what I have experienced first hand in the classroom. Thank you againg for your thoughtful post. I would love to have more open dialogues and opportunities to collaborate with other elementary educators as we together help to shine a light on the power of integrated science and literacy!  

 

Yes, that is an excellent point, Jenn! I wish we could have had more time in our webinar to dig into all of these important pieces, especially when it comes to integration. 

Science vocabulary is complex, and necessary. A strategy that we have used that supports many of the principles described here for building vocabulary is ABC-CBV: Activity Before Concept - Concept Before Vocabulary. Students who have identified and described a concept by engaging in an activity are primed for acquiring academic language to describe that concept. For instance, students engaging with the question of how things start to move by interacting with wheeled carts on a level surface will identify that things need to be pushed or pulled by something (or someone!) in order to start to move. That action, that thing that starts the movement, can then be termed "force" thus building a deep understanding of the vocabulary term that doesn't rely on memorization or reference to unfamiliar concepts or inorganic understanding.

I think we all understand how important reading skills are for our early elementary students. And I'm sure some of the programs out there are good and are necessary. But it saddens me to see science "sacrificed" in order to add more minutes for reading programs. I'm so glad that teachers, including yourself, are seeing the power of integration when done strategically so as to not "sacrifice" either the science OR reading standards. I hope these resources help :)

Our water unit in 2nd grade is anchored around what happened to the town of Moncton (Cedar Falls) in the early 1900s (adapted from the water unit here https://allcirclesoflearning.com/?page_id=25) . It's a town in our watershed that was (spoiler alert) inadvertently flooded by building a dam to protect water for the City of Seattle after the great fire.  Despite being warned (apparently), the dam construction was inappropriate for the soil composition so it wound up leaking water under the dam and flooding the town!  There is a lot of soil tub physical modeling with materials to test dams and drainage. In addition to this storyline about how engineering designs can impact different places (e.g. solved problem for Seattle but caused a problem for a town... what should be done?), we also use the Water Protectors book, explore our local watershed (hoping to add field trip about that next year), and observing different ways water interacts with the land.  For us, it's more of an engineering story around how to share resources and recognizing that sometimes meeting our needs means it impacts others.

I will say that mapping skills are really fun for 2nd graders.  How are you thinking about the math connections? 

Very cool way of integrating button making and identity.  I've often thought a button making machine would be a great addition to the Classroom and It's wonderful to see the button making process also tie in with personal identification. 

Wanda, you always share great resources! 

I've been using the "draw-a-scientist" activity with my Elementary Science Methods course for pre-service elementary teachers as I try to get them to understand that their own science experiences as students can influence their own science identity and how they might approach teaching science in their own classrooms. Oftentimes, they haven't had positive experiences or don't have any memories at all of learning science until high school. I try to empower them as future teachers to create science experiences in their elementary classrooms that impacts all of their students so that their students see themselves as learners and doers of science! 

Leslie,

I cannot agree more.  This was a constant struggle for me when I was in the classroom. One strategy that worked was collaboration with the special educator and developing a "come in" protocoal rather than a "pull out" protocol. My special educator came into my classroom during my science and social studies blocks which we my "longest blocks" of the school day and by doing this was able to often support more than one student at a time . The good thing about this is we were not working at cross purposes. We were both much better able to meet the needs of struggling learners without the learner being dragged kicking and screaming ( sometimes literally) out of the one learning time in the day they enjoyed and did not have to struggle to learn. 

In the beginning this took quite a bit of what felt like extra planning until it became the norm for us to plan together. We blocked off time at the beginning of each unit to talk about where the students were, the gains they had made not only in science but in language, reading and writing, too. 

Parents were happier too because their children came home happier.

If you can make this work with your special educator, title one teacher or multingual teacher , I highly recommend it.  I also did the same for my math block.