Our Climate is Changing, Why Aren’t We? Children’s Literature Book Study convened virtually for the fifth session in late February. Engaging nearly 60 educators from across ESDs NEWESD 101 (Spokane), ESD 123 (Tri-Cities), NCESD (Wenatchee), and ESD 105 (Yakima), we explored the text Sharing Books Talking Science: Exploring Scientific Concepts with Children’s Literature by Valerie Ban-Jenson and Mark Lubkowitz.
Through the use of expert groups and a jigsaw strategy, educators shared their focused learning on a crosscutting concept of their choice with the entire professional learning community. Educators connected their crosscutting concept to how we can use these lenses to better understand climate change and to the children’s books used throughout this series.
Teacher Participants share about their selected crosscutting concept to the whole group to deepen our understanding of how literature can support student learning.
The goal for this session was to support educators in seeing how to use children’s books beyond those shared in this book study series to support students in developing their use of the crosscutting concepts used to make sense of science phenomena. Additional resources beyond the text were shared with educators to better support their work in their classrooms.
What teachers are saying…
“[Regarding Scale, Proportion, and Quantity]… one of the things we really talked about is basically that kids need to understand that scaling in all this is relative. They do it every day, whether they’re checking the temperature of the water to see if it’s warm enough to shower, or if it’s too cold. Or if they’re checking outside, is it too windy? Do I need a coat? Do I need a sweater? Kids basically every day need to realize that they are constantly using all this information, whether they know it or not. And then we kind of talked about the Goldilocks scale, which I thought was really neat, because kids can totally relate to that. We can’t see the really small things, and we can’t see the really big things. At least, you know in that kind, but every day we can see everything in between.”
“I ended up printing the Crosscutting Concept cards and plan on sharing them with our K-5 staff. I really like how they have sentence stems for teachers and students to use. I think the teachers will appreciate cards that have English and Spanish on them. Thanks also for the matrix of the CCC’s.”
