Science Training

 Our district is adopting a new science program and I'm pretty excited about it!  It's a program called GEMS-NET and it stems from our state college.  I used the program when I was student teaching (about 5 years ago) and the students loved it.

I'm not completely versed on it yet, so I think this is how it will work.  Every 3 months or so, all the second grade teachers will get a kit.  The kit is a large box full of materials and a teaching guide.  In the guided are a unit's worth of lessons on a certain science topic for our grade.  ALL the materials (except water) for EVERY lesson are included in this kit.  How awesome is that??  

When we finish teaching the lessons, we pack the kit back up and send it back to the college.  Then we get a new kit with a different topic.  I'm a little nervous because this is wayyy more science than I have ever done and I know that there is a lot of set-up involved.  Here's to hoping it goes well!

In December we went to our first training and learned the basics about how to teach from the kits.

The best part of the training?  We got to do the experiments too!  Check it out:

Yesterday's training was about writing in science.  Writing is a HUGE part of these kits, as I quickly found out.  We learned how to teach the students to put their ideas, findings and conclusions into words.  These are two of the books that we are going to use to guide us:

The students will be creating Science Notebooks to record their experiments and their writing.  This is my first experience with these notebooks so there will definitely be a learning curve for me, but I am looking forward to trying something new!  Here is the {pseudo} Science Notebook I made yesterday:

As we do the experiments and create our notebooks in class, I will definitely share what is working (and what might not be!).