We are counting on YOU to direct our mission!
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Need to share livestream sessions with students?This is the place! If your students are working remotely and you need to share our livestream archives with them, simply grab the link and share it through your learning management platform. Each bit.ly link takes students to a Safe YouTube version of the archive. If you need an alternate format, please drop us a line at Curious@Go2Science.com and we'll do our best to accommodate!
Lesson adaptations to support social distancing.Each week, we provide two new lesson opportunities. Some will be very easy to adapt to a distanced classroom setting. Some require a bit more thinking. We're here to help with that! Remember, you can skip any lessons you choose and still provide your students with a great mission experience. Even under normal conditions, it is rare that a class do EVERY lesson associated with a mission, so be kind to yourselves. Less really can be more! That being said, I'll add to this page weekly so you can find adaptation ideas for the lessons you DO choose to do.
My all time favorite homemade play dough recipe is the one my mom used to make play dough for me as a child. She wrote the recipe out for me when I started teaching. I’ve yet to find one I like better! 
Remote: This activity makes a great family project. The spine uses nine pieces of paper and the skull three more for 12 pages of fun and learning! Challenge students to work on this over time at home. Encourage siblings and adults help with the cutting and assembly. Make sure they share photos comparing their spine to things around their house and yard!
Student access made super easy!School may look quite different to some of your learners this fall. We want to give you the tools to meet student needs no matter how (or where) they are learning! Each week, we'll post links to field videos on this page so you can push them to student devices or post to your learning management system without having to set up accounts or passwords for your students. The internet is a wonderful way to explore the world, but kids need to be safe! That's why we're sharing links for our videos via Safe Youtube to support your distance learning this mission! You can send parents here to collect the links or copy and paste them and share via the platform of your choice. The videos are also visible by clicking on the video thumbnail. To ensure kids' safety, we advise teacher and parents not to share this page directly with your young students if they are unsupervised. Children should also be supervised if watching videos or livestreams directly on the site.
Here's one more tool for your digital learning tool kit!We're trying something new for this mission! Each comic will have a Story Time with Beth and Curtis edition. As we create each video, we'll link it below and provide you with a Safe YouTube link to share with students directly or link to our Mini Mobile Headquarters! Want more Story Time with Beth and Curtis content? Click here!
What to do with your dinosaur cookie cutters! Normally, I'm not a fan of "cookie cutter" education. But using cookie cutters in new and novel ways is a whole different situation! Of course you can print and use our dinosaur cookie cutters to create delicious dinosaur cookies (perhaps to celebrate your publication at the end of the mission), but here are some other ways to use these very simple to print files!
Skill building with comics!
Now, before sharing the full comic in print or video form, present three or four cards to sequence. (I suggest starting with the middle row.) Have your readers and pre-readers describe the action in each scene to justify the order they selected. Talking about why they placed each picture as they did is a great way to build language skills! Add in more cards to increase the challenge. Finally, reveal the full comic and check those predictions. Yay!!!  Curious about critters?While we are here to investigate our hypothesis, there are all sorts of interesting things to investigate. We wish we could look for everything, but we need our research team to make some hard decisions. Which of these three critters should we spend a little extra time trying to find next week while we look for fossils? Discuss and vote!  Building Memory CapacityThis week's tip works for all ages and reading levels! Our comic can be useful for building both long term and working memory. To follow the story over time, students rely on long term memory to recall what happened in last week's installment. Working memory helps students follow the story as they read it. They need to remember the last word they read or the last action that happened while thinking about the next word or action. Try these strategies to build both types of memory!
Looking for more literacy tips? Check out last week's blog post!
Shrinking the vocabulary gap across the socioeconomic spectrum.It is well documented that children in lower economic status homes typically have a much smaller vocabulary than children from more affluent homes. (Check out links to some of those articles below.) This smaller vocabulary puts them at a significant disadvantage. We want to close the "word gap!" We introduce and practice a wide range of words in our videos, livestreams, and lessons. We support vocabulary acquisition though multiple pathways and strategies based in best practice so that ALL students have a chance to learn and apply new words.
Download word cards and vocabulary lists!This approach works! I love this story from a teacher. As one of her kindergarten students was walking with his parent to the family car after school, this child stopped in his tracks and picked up a shard of plastic. He held it up and examined it carefully as he verbalized his thinking. "This looks like a broken tail light, but I notice that the color and pattern is different than the tail light on our car. The phenotype doesn't match!" The astonished parent related this tale to the teacher who revealed that phenotype was a Go2Science vocabulary word for the current mission. She went on to provide the definition for the parent.
For more info check out these links:
SES differences in language processing skill and vocabulary are evident at 18 months (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3582035/) Early Learning and School Readiness: Can Early Intervention Make a Difference? (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/173860/summary) Tackling the "Vocabulary Gap" Between Rich and Poor Children (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201402/tackling-the-vocabulary-gap-between-rich-and-poor-children) |
Meet Beth and Curtis!Presidential Award-Winning teacher and hula hoop fanatic, Beth loves bringing real world science to kids! Beth is fascinated by engineering challenges, technology, and outdoor learning spaces. After 25 years teaching kindergarten, she’s excited to share her passion and experience on-line with classrooms from around the world! Archives
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