Teaching About the Natural World

This course is designed to increase confidence, enthusiasm and knowledge for teaching elementary science. Science can be an essential part of an elementary classroom not only to achieve key science learning goals, but also as a means to engage and motivate students as well as support literacy and mathematics learning. An overarching focus of the course is the idea that doing science entails individuals using wide-ranging ways of acting, reasoning, and communicating with others to figure outphenomena. Science is not about memorizing facts; rather, it is about constructing, debating, and revising multiple explanations and models about the natural world. With this in mind, this course is designed to offer you numerous opportunities to read literature that illustrates this vision and to engage and reflect upon this type of science teaching and learning.