Planning science...

Kia Ora koutou
A large part of my work is supporting schools in exploring the Nature of Science and putting it into practice in the classroom. I think there's lots of space for episodes of science, or experiences -it could be during news time from an object someone's brought in or an article from the news, or during reading -exploring school journals, connecteds and the internet and the science within as well as during writing time, maths time, PE time... you get the picture! 
However there is a place for those longer more focused units as well. For example you might want to explore geology in a bit more detail or chemical reactions, or a local science issue, etc where a 1 or 2 lesson spot won't give students the time to get really deep into the subject. 
Questions to ask include thinking about how the unit is going to progress -are you going to have every lesson and activity pre-planned or will there be space for students to investigate further, looking for answers to questions you didn't think of! Some students may even wander off in a totally different direction so how do you cater for that?! 
For now, I thought I would write about what I think is important in planning a topic!

My first place would be to do a bit of browsing. I'm going to use an example where a school teacher asked for some help in planning a unit around rocks. This is not a definitive list of what to do or how to do it, just some ideas. My colleague Anne was coincidentally looking at planning rock units too and had totally different ideas -and some of these were much better than my ideas!

I'd start with doing a bit of browsing. Have a bit of a read up on the topic, in this case rocks. I started by looking at children's websites as I thought I'd have a better chance to understand rocks. i chose New Zealand sites primarily and then as I learnt a bit more, went overseas. i also started to grow questions and wonderings that I would look up. I found that by the third or fourth website, I was starting to already know what they were talking about so got more confident. You might want to look at the Building Science Concepts resource that have very good introductions.

Once you feel that you have a bit of background, it's time to plan! I've pasted an email conversation that I had with this teacher below...

1)      Start with the essence statement: children explore how the natural physical world works… with my limited understanding of geology, I know that there is a rock cycle, and that rocks are part of our environment, that they are part of our land That would be interesting to explore further! I know that it is important to know about geology –especially with landslides, growing gardens (although that’s more to do with soil Is soil rocks? Is sand?). Are the rocks in your area/town different to other places? How come? What’s our whakapapa (in terms of geology)?

2)      Children explore how science works… how do scientists explore rocks? What terms do they use? How do they classify rocks? I stuck a few bits in your shared folder that helps with these… How could we find out (probably internet!); can we go exploring a few different places to look at rocks (or have someone bring in some rocks from a few different places around Opotiki)… How could we classify them? (And yes, I would let children break rocks to look inside if they’re breakable –the rocks, not the children!). What names do scientists have for rocks? How can we learn to identify our rocks? What names do rock scientists have? What kinds of science involves rocks -initially I was thinking just about geologists but then there would be paleontologists, those involved in drilling and oil exploration... Could they have a visit from someone? Or watch a video? Or doa skype chat?

3)      And now the science capabilities or the Nature of Science… Take a look at your class level of NoS and how you could have these at the top of your unit –what are we developing in our children? Remember this is the overarching strand, our science focus. What will be deliberately teaching? What will we assess formatively? You might prefer the science capabilities (italicised below) on TKI as we look at the NoS strands

·         Investigating in science: how do children gather and interpret data, how do the use evidence to build explanations… “I notice that this rock is very rough, it’s actually quite sharp. It’s yellow and light brown with white bits on the surface. I think the white bits might be right through the rock so we broke it in half and found that they are. We looked at the white bits through a magnifying glass and they look like tiny bits of shells. The rock also is made up of lots of very tiny bits of rocks like sand. I think this will be a sort of sedimentary rock and when we googled it, a website said that this rock is called limestone. I looked it up on another site and they agreed it is limestone which is made up of little bits of rock. We checked where it came from –Wairoa and yes, Wairoa is a place made up of limestone.” There might be some issues around rocks in your community -water in aquifers, unstable cliffs, quarries, etc

·         Communicating in science: using correct vocabulary, learning how to describe the rocks correctly, knowing the names of some common rocks, drawing rock cycles (part of the Making Interpretations capability)…

4)      So for further support –Science Learning Hub, Pond, te Awa (NZ encyclopaedia and very good too), google for lessons from overseas and then put our context over the top... remember our goal is developing the Nature of Science within the students so that they can become critical, informed and responsible members of society in which science plays a significant role (essence statement, p. 17 NZC). I think there is a place for children to learn the names of rocks, for example, but I want to try and think about NoS rather than content. If students don't get the concept, I'm okay about that as they are exploring! If I did want them to learn what limestone and sandstone are and their differences, I might think about ensuring that children would know why we should know the difference... 

5)      Māori context: are there te reo names for the rocks? I looked here and was amazed at how many words the Māori have for soil (http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/table/5241/maori-words-for-soil) –bit like the Inuit and how many words they have for snow! What were rocks used for –hangi, weapons, carving… what if you lived somewhere where there weren’t good rocks? How did local hapu get hold of pounamu? Did they trade obsidian (matā) with others? This is a bit a weak idea here -I'm still getting my head around what a Māori context would look like as I don't think te reo quite covers it (although it's still a start). I would like to explore tikanga -principles and protocols that may exist. There may be stories around local rocks and hills that we could look at.

and then some other ideas...

6)      Maths context (one of our achievement challenges): can children estimate size and weight? Can they learn to?

7)      Literacy context: reading about the rocks, learning the style of language and using it in our own writing, writing explanations and descriptions…

As I said at the beginning, this was just a brief conversation to start the ball rolling. I'd be curious about your ideas too! As I said, Anne had a quite different approach altogether -maybe she'll tell you in the comments! For me, the big thing is thinking about why are we doing this unit and what we want to do... I'm trying hard to plan and teach science in a different way to how I would teach Social Sciences or Art or Reading. There may be some similarities but they are different learning areas with their own philosophies, ways of thinking and behaving -and our children should know that too!

And... out of the unit, you may end up with children wanting to collect rocks, explore earth sciences in more detail, go to university and become famous like Hamish Campbell!

https://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/News-and-Events/Media-Releases/Fossil-fish-scale