Teacher Training By Dr. Diana Wehrell-Grabowski

USA Today  (10/7, Vergano) reported that the U.S. Science and Engineering Festival begins this weekend and “will feature everything from Nobel laureates demonstrating experiments to lessons on outsmarting robots.” The festival will encompass events in 20 cities and end Oct. 23-24 “with thousands of hands-on scince activities and all-day performances from stages at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.” This year’s festival is sponsored by Lockheed Martin and will include stage shows hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the NIH, National Academies of Science and the Science Channel.

Seventy Seminole Tribe of Florida early childhood teachers attended a full-day hands-on science inquiry-based teacher training professional staff development workshop to learn how to teach science through children’s literature conducted by Dr. Diana Wehrell-Grabowski. Teachers were actively engaged in exploring early childhood science concepts through hands-on explorations. Additionally, teachers were introduced to early childhood children’s literature that can be used to teach early childhood science concepts in the classroom and at home. Teachers conducted hands-on explorations to investigate:  the nature of matter, floating and sinking, plant and animal kingdom concepts, how rocks break down into smaller pieces, mathematical concepts including patterns, shapes, and sorting. The teacher training workshop was a great success. Participants left the workshop with increased content knowledge, motivated, confident, and ready to implement what they had learned in the teacher training workshop within their own classrooms. All of the children’s literature used during the teacher training workshop can be viewed and ordered from Amazon via this site at no extra charge (see book page).