al-mofhariz

If you have ever read my blog before, you know that I am passionate about including vocabulary connections in my science classroom.  What you may not know, is that I am passionate about including natural vocabulary connections in all curricular areas!  For the past several years, with the help of my wonderful mentor Kip Bisignano from Delta Education, I have implemented these strategies into my classroom. What has been the result?  Well, not only have my science scores risen but my math, reading and social studies scores have risen as well.  I am NOT putting more time into reading instruction - but instead am putting more reading, language and writing into my content areas.  One hour is enough for guided reading! In thinking about the new year, I thought it would be great to have a planning guide with proven structures listed and ready for me to pull from and plan.  I have created a list of 20 tried and true structures, many of which I have already blogged ...

Just before Christmas break, we spent some time creating bird feeders for our local birds.  Let me warn you...it did create a MESS on the floor.  However, my students were wonderful helpers with the clean up and graciously borrowed brooms from other classes to sweep it all up in no time! Here's what we started with: We made two bird feeders.  The first one was the typical pinecone feeder with a twist.  Because so many students have peanut allergies, I couldn't use peanut butter as the spread.  Instead we used shortening - generic for crisco. The crisco was much cheaper than peanut butter too!!! The students started with yarn and tied it around the pinecone, spread crisco on the cone and then dipped it in the birdseed.    The next one was really fun...old fashioned popcorn strings with a twist! Instead of using thread and a needle, we used wire from the craft store.  The kids could easily string the popcorn on the wire and no risk of getting c...

Chicago's Field Museum is making drastic cuts to basic research in order to meet a constrained budget. Lukas has argued  that this should be seen as a blow to scientists, historians of science, and members of the public, even while we acknowledge museums' complex roots in the cultural capital of the Gilded Age. Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Field_Museum_of_Natural_History.jpg Both Lukas's analysis and poignancy feel spot on, and I take seriously the idea that we can't cleave them apart. Museums don't just conveniently blur analytical binaries (like public and private, internal and external, expert and lay) for historians of science; they're also sites with which people fall in love, and thus a hook for wider audiences. People who study museums—like Lukas, Jenna Tonn , and others—know this well. But I think one thing the Field Museum episode reveals is that, even within the academy (indeed, even within history of science), there are s...

A few weeks ago, I attended a birthday party at the University of Chicago called "Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It was a stimulating event, and I left with many thoughts, problems, and puzzles. Below, I try to capture the gestalt of the presentations and discussions there. My post follows a nice summary that Michael Barany gave us of a sister Kuhn event at Princeton. Tom Kuhn Wants His Theories Back, You Hippie Sociologist!! If there was one theme that came through during the conference, it was a renewed interest in reasoning by exemplars, and the papers there suggested that a great deal of compelling work is being done on this topic and that a great deal more remains to be explored. At times, discussions of reasoning by exemplar took on the feeling of agenda-setting: some programmatic vision for the history of science being cast on the shores of Lake Michigan. We'll see what it nets. You'll see fl...

As many of our readers attempt to recover from the semester's end, I'm pleased to present a guest post by David Spanagel, reflecting on a just-completed pedagogical experience. This past term, I had the rare pleasure of teaching the history of modern American science and Technology survey course at WPI, an institution populated predominantly by engineering and natural sciences majors.  Despite the high opportunity costs involved, I selected just two books to “cover” the twentieth century portion of this course, and both of these featured the role of physicists in developing the atomic bomb during World War II.   A Tale of Two Cities , produced by the War Department in 1946, online thanks to the Prelinger Archives -- and one of Dan's favorite teaching films David Cassidy’s recently published A Short History of Physics in the America Century lived up to its title, providing my fact-obsessed but reading-averse engineering students with just 170 pages that introduce and contex...

Karl Akeley's famous "Fighting African Elephants" being put on display at the Field Museum in Chicago, ~1905. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago is one of the country's oldest, largest, and most respected institutions of its kind. It has played a leading role in the global effort to collect, study, and exhibit remnants of our world's biodiversity for over a century, but it looks as though this legacy may be nearing its end. According to articles in Nature and the Chicago Tribune , the museum's administration recently announced that it would cut spending on basic research by $3 million to help meet its goal of reducing the overall budget by some $5 million next year. Among other things, this decision will almost certainly require breaking tenure to lay off curators. Last Tuesday, the museum's new president and CEO, Richard Lariviere, announced that all of its academic departments--Geology, Zoology, Anthropology, and Botany--would be eliminated ...

Do you build models of the watershed in your classroom? As part of our unit on natural resources, we teach students the importance of watersheds, forests, and mineral resources.  We are responsible for teaching the students about what a watershed is and how humans impact it. So to start, we teach students what a watershed is.  They are all familiar with the water cycle model.  I use this to start as they can connect what they already know to something new.  When looking at this model I point out that water runs downhill towards a body of water.  When they ask, what about the water that just soaks into the ground - I remind them of ground water. Where I live we don't have city water - not even at our school!  We are very familiar with well systems...so they understand that there is water underground. Next I want them to learn that a watershed is land. We all live in a watershed. A watershed is simply an area of land that leads to a body of water.  In V...

  Comment: My Heart breaks for the parents, the children and the staff at Sandy Hook Elementary. God Bless them...  

I asked Matt Wisnioski to share something with our readers about the history of technological change and innovation in celebration of the release of his book, Engineers for Change . I'm extraordinarily happy to offer this guest post on the unexpectedly fascinating history of a modern slogan. Change or die! Innovation  advertisement from 1970. Source: "Change or Die!" Electronic Design  18, no. 13 (1970), 64. A sure sign that an idiom has become a meme is when journalists attract page clicks by speculating on what it would mean to take it literally. That was the opening conceit of Alan Deutschman’s 2005 article “ Change or Die ” for the magazine Fast Company. Summarizing IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook conference, where “the most farsighted thinkers from around the world” addressed seemingly intractable global problems, he argued that science has shown that in only one time out of nine, when faced with preventable conditions like heart attacks, are people able to change. T...