Help your students master analyzing graphs and diagrams and writing claim evidence reasoning scientific explanations with these free practice problems
Picture the first week of school. Instead of a syllabus and a seating chart, your students walk into a crime scene. There’s a case to solve, evidence taped to the board, and a room full of kids who suddenly forgot they were nervous about the first day. They’re arguing about
Why AI literacy matters for our students, and a few simple ways we can start teaching it. More than half of our students are already using AI. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of teens say they have used an AI chatbot to help with
I’m just going to put this out there. AI isn’t here to replace great teaching. It’s here to support it. Think of AI as your teaching assistant helping you plan lessons faster, personalize learning for your students, provide meaningful feedback, and spend less time on repetitive tasks so you can
I’m not the type of teacher who likes to start the first days of school by going over the syllabus and talking about rules. I teach mostly 8th graders, and by now, they know the basic rules. Classroom and school rules really haven’t changed much since they started kindergarten. Now,
A simple daily science bell ringer routine that gets middle schoolers thinking like scientists the second they walk in. The first five minutes of class used to get away from me. I stand at the door every morning saying hi to students as they come in, and some of them
If you have ever searched for resources on teaching CER to English Language Learners or students with IEPs, you have probably noticed something: almost everything out there is written for a general classroom. The assumption is that your students can read the prompt, understand the vocabulary, organize their thinking, and
It is Thursday afternoon. You have a stack of CER paragraphs to grade, and all you can think of is, “Will I be able to get through all of these today without having to stay late or continue working over the weekend?” You open the first one, read it carefully
If you have ever been to a professional development session on teaching CER and walked away thinking “this sounds great, but I have no idea where it fits in my already packed curriculum,” you are not alone. That was a common topic of discussion at lunch when CER was first
It was the Thursday after Thanksgiving break. We had already written more than 20 CER paragraphs since the beginning of the year. I had just spent the class period teaching CER with our first practice problem back from the break. We went through the problem, broke down the reading, analyzed
Teaching heat transfer by conduction, convection, and radiation is one topic that excites my students. It’s important to help them understand how energy moves through our world. I’ve found that using the 5E lesson plan model—Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate—to help me teach thermal energy transfer makes this big
Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year, and I love bringing spooky fun Halloween science activities into my classroom. From bubbling cauldrons to eerie color changing potions, these Halloween chemistry experiments are always a hit. They keep my middle school science students engaged during the long stretch of October
Fall is here and Halloween is on the way. This is the perfect excuse to mix spooky fun with hands-on learning. From floating pumpkins and pumpkin STEM activities to a skeleton project, animal adaptations, and monster genetics, these Halloween science activities will keep your students engaged and excited. #1: Pumpkin
Ends Wednesday August 5
