Guest blog post by Tess Caswell (tess_caswell@brown.edu)
One of the best parts about being a graduate student is that
you have a bit of flexibility in your schedule (even if you do work long
hours!) which means that it’s not too hard to spend the occasional hour or two
volunteering. Here at Brown we put some of our free time into a fun and
productive activity: teaching earth science to elementary school students!
The partnership started in 2005, when students at Brown
learned that science had been removed from the local public schools’ second
grade curriculum. Brown graduate students then teamed up with teachers at local
Vartan Gregorian Elementary School to give these kids the basic science
education that they needed and deserved. Over time, science has been
reintegrated into the curriculum but our lessons live on. We’ve developed a
suite of hands-on activities that can be used to teach kids, and we hope that
you use them!
At the link below,
you’ll find lesson plans and handouts for a suite of basic science topics. The
lessons follow the sequence of science topics in the Providence Public Schools’
curriculum, but are also linked to the Next Generation Science Standards for
crosscutting concepts. All of the lessons use the Scientific Method as their
foundation and, of course, each involves an experiment! They are structured to
include a “Research” section in which the volunteers teach the students the
basics of the topic, a “Hypothesis” section where the kids synthesize their own
ideas about what will happen during the experiment, and a “Results” section
where the students record their observations and describe whether their
hypothesis was correct. The handouts include space for the students to write
and draw – and have been vetted by our second grade teacher, Ms. Robinson.
Take a look at the lesson plans and see if there are any you
can use. And, of course, please contact us if you have any questions!
You can find the lesson plans here:
You can find the lesson plans here:
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