Teacher Training By Dr. Diana Wehrell-Grabowski

Snippets of a teacher training workshop conducted for early childhood through year 6 teachers in Bangkok, Thailand. Workshop entitled “Teaching Science Through Children’s Literature”. During the two-day training teachers explored:

• Inquiry-based science practices
• Critical thinking skills
• Reflective journaling in the science classroom
• Using children’s literature to introduce and reinforce science and math concepts
• States of matter
• Structure and function
• Force, motion, and energy concepts
• Methods of seed dispersal

As always it was a great group of teachers. Check out the video highlighting some of the investigations the teachers conducted during the training.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vteF7edDDPc

Back from conducting teacher training in the state of Colorado. Forty K-8 teachers from two Colorado magnet schools attended the training entitled “Integrating Science and Children’s Literature”. Teachers were introduced to over 60 children’s K-8 books that can be used to introduce and reinforce K-8 science concepts. Teachers were actively engaged in conducting hands-on-minds-on inquiry-based explorations to investigate K-8 science concepts. The Colorado Department of Education has revised the science standards from 5 to 3 to include Physical, Life and Earth Systems Science. The largest change to the science standards is acknowledging that scientific inquiry, science process skills, and content can’t be taught separately. These important aspects of science were integrated into the three science content standards. This change makes total sense. Teachers must integrate the nature of science, science process skills within all science explorations students undertake, as opposed to covering the nature of science in isolation in the first nine weeks of the school year. The following sample photos were taken from the Integrating Science and Children’s Literature K-8 teacher training workshop held in Colorado. Once again it was a great group of teachers.