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Unit Template: Text-Based Reading in STEM Inquiry

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This template provides an approach for creating a STEM investigation that includes text-based inquiry to build student STEM literacy skills. It is populated with examples and resources to support your authoring. The template was created to support library media specialists and STEM teacher cohorts in year two of the School Librarians Advancing STEM Learning project, led by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management (ISKME) in partnership with Granite State University, New Hampshire, and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Educators who chose to remix this template will trade out example language with their own language and design.

Material Type: Unit of Study

Authors: Joanna Schimizzi, Letha Goger

CK-12 Life Science For Middle School

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CK-12’s Life Science delivers a full course of study in the life sciences for the middle school student, relating an understanding of the history, disciplines, tools, and modern techniques of science to the exploration of cell biology, genetics, evolution, prokaryotes, protists, fungi, plants, the animal kingdom, the human body, and ecology. This digital textbook was reviewed for its alignment with California content standards.

Material Type: Textbook

Author: Douglas Wilkin, Ph.D.

ACESSE Resource E: Selecting Anchoring Phenomena for Equitable 3D Teaching and Assessment

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This pair of workshops is designed to introduce you to the process of selecting phenomena that can anchor an entire unit that supports students’ 3D science learning or that can serve as a basis for a multi-component assessment task. This resource can also be used by individuals wanting to refine their teaching practice around phenomena based instruction. You may have heard a lot about phenomena, but you may also be wondering what exactly they are, and whether using phenomena is any different from how teachers teach today already.This learning experience will help you:Explain to a peer the role of phenomena and design challenges in science teaching, with a particular focus on equity and justice. Generate working definitions of phenomena, design challenges, and disciplinary core ideas. Identify phenomena related to a bundle of three-dimensional standards. Experience how phenomena can be introduced at the start of a unit, in order to launch a student-driven series of questions.

Material Type: Module

Authors: Hank Clark, WILLIAM PENUEL, Philip Bell, Deb Morrison, Abby Rhinehart

6.3 Weather, Climate & Water Cycling

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The goals of OpenSciEd are to ensure any science teacher, anywhere, can access and download freely available, high quality, locally adaptable full-course materials. REMOTE LEARNING GUIDE FOR THIS UNIT NOW AVAILABLE! This unit on weather, climate, and water cycling is broken into four separate lesson sets. In the first two lesson sets, students explain small-scale storms. In the third and fourth lesson sets, students explain mesoscale weather systems and climate-level patterns of precipitation. Each of these two parts of the unit is grounded in a different anchoring phenomenon.

Material Type: Full Course, Lesson, Lesson Plan, Module, Teaching/Learning Strategy, Unit of Study

Author: OpenSciEd

Fence That Farmland!

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Students develop and solidify their understanding of the concept of "perimeter" as they engage in a portion of the civil engineering task of land surveying. Specifically, they measure and calculate the perimeter of a fenced in area of "farmland," and see that this length is equivalent to the minimum required length of a fence to enclose it. Doing this for variously shaped areas confirms that the perimeter is the minimal length of fence required to enclose those shapes. Then students use the technology of a LEGO MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT robot to automate this task. After measuring the perimeter (and thus required fence length) of the "farmland," students see the NXT robot travel around this length, just as a surveyor might travel around an area during the course of surveying land or measuring for fence materials. While practicing their problem solving and measurement skills, students learn and reinforce their scientific and geometric vocabulary.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Ursula Koniges