STEM to Story: Enthralling and Effective Lesson Plans for Grades 5-8

By 826 National

Bring STEM to life for students with zombies, rockets, celebrities, and more

STEM to Story: Enthralling and Effective Lesson Plans for Grades 5-8 inspires learning through fun, engaging, and meaningful lesson plans that fuse hands-on discovery in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) with creative writing. The workshop activities within the book are the innovative result of a partnership between 826 National's proven creative writing model and Time Warner Cable's Connect a Million Minds, an initiative dedicated to connecting young people to the wonders of STEM through hands-on learning. Authentically aligned with both the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards, this book provides teachers, after-school and out-of-school providers, and parents with field-tested lessons, workshops, and projects designed by professionals in each field. Including reflective observations by arts and science celebrities like Jon Scieszka, Mayim Bialik, and Steve Hockensmith, lessons feature bonus activities, fun facts, and teaching points for instructors at every level. These quirky, exploratory lessons will effectively awaken student imaginations and passions for both STEM and creative writing, encourage identity with scientific endeavors, and make both science and writing fun.

Grades five through eight is the critical period for engaging students in STEM, and this book is designed specifically to appeal to – and engage – this age group. The guided curricula fosters hands-on discovery, deep learning, and rich inquiry skills while feeling more like play than school, and has proven popular and effective with both students and teachers.

• Awaken student imagination and get them excited about STEM
• Fuse creative writing with STEM using hands-on activities
• Make scientific principles relevant to students' lives
• Inspire students to explore STEM topics further

The demand for STEM workers is closely linked to global competitiveness, and a successful future in STEM depends upon an early introduction to the scientific mindset. The challenge for teachers is to break through students' preconceptions of STEM fields as "hard" or "boring," to show them that STEM is everywhere, it's relevant, and it's loads of fun. For proven lesson plans with just a dash of weird, STEM to Story is a dynamic resource, adaptable and applicable in school, after school, and at home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781119001027

826 National

826 NATIONAL is a family of seven nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping underserved students, ages six through eighteen, with their creative and expository writing skills. They're located in San Francisco.

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PREFACE

When people think of science, technology, engineering, and math—or STEM—the relationship to creative writing is not the first thing that comes to mind. STEM brings up visions of hard science—beakers, syringes, computer code, and strands of DNA. Think of creative writing, and you probably think of feather-tipped quill pens, coffee shops, and angst. But we see something different. Creativity is the cornerstone of science in all its forms, regardless of the discipline, and writing is common to all subjects. It is a well-known fact that many of the inventions we use today—the cell phone, the electric car, the Internet—were first imagined by creative writers of science fiction. Yes, you have a creative writer to thank every time you make that phone call while taking pictures on vacation.

Somewhere along the way, the ability to think creatively and express new ideas in all forms (writing being the one most central to 826 National) got separated from the STEM discussion. This book is our effort at reconciliation. How did we start? Well, like many good stories, ours begins with a woman and a man (the writers of this preface, Tessie Topol and Gerald Richards) from two organizations, a ridiculously bold plan, and a room full of mad scientists. Perhaps the scientists weren't mad, but there was a room full of them, and representatives of foundations and corporations as well, all looking for ways to engage young people in STEM.

826 National's partnership with Time Warner Cable (TWC) began at Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) America in 2011 with a basic question: How do we make STEM more engaging, especially to students in low-income and underresourced communities? At that meeting, we made a commitment to action, to bring together 826 National's proven creative writing model and TWC's Connect a Million Minds, an initiative dedicated to connecting young people to the wonders of STEM through hands-on learning (www.connectamillionminds.com).

The result was a four-week STEM and creative writing pilot program conducted in summer 2012 at 826 National chapters in Los Angeles and New York, where more than sixty students engaged in hands-on learning around a range of inquiry-based topics, including the science behind ice cream and deep space exploration. In one lesson, kids designed their own experiments to determine whether salt or sugar made ice melt faster. The resulting discussion around the properties of salt led to a -creative writing exercise in which students each composed a short story about a scientist who wakes up one morning in a world without salt. This original lesson was published in 826 National's book of writing lessons Don't Forget to Write, and parts are adapted here in this book.

The initial pilot was so successful that we decided to build on that and conduct workshops in summer 2013. Once again STEM and creative writing workshops were carried out at 826LA and 826NYC. But we were left with another question. Would these workshops work outside the walls of an 826? If you took away 826LA's Time Travel Mart or 826NYC's Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., would students still be interested? So the pilot was expanded to include other TWC partners, Operation Breakthrough in Kansas City, Missouri, and the YMCA of Greater New York. Beyond examining the science of salt, that summer students donned lab coats and protective goggles to build landing gear for touching down on fictional planets, then put pen to paper to create stories about alien landscapes. And once again we had success on our hands, so much so that the YMCA expanded the number of students using the lessons from twenty to eighty-one!

The results of the pilot projects encouraged our two organizations to work together to create the STEM and creative writing book that you have in your hands. Filled with workshops on such topics as the physics of music, writing science fiction, and the science of superpowers, this book is meant to encourage kids to get their hands dirty, to be curious and ask questions, and to use what they've learned to spark their imagination. And to love every minute of it. Who knows? The next Gene Roddenberry or Madeleine L'Engle may be in your midst, dreaming of the next invention or innovation that could change the world.

You may be thinking, I don't know much about science, or I haven't worked on a math problem in years! That's okay. This book is for you as much as it's for your students. We wanted to make the lessons here easy enough to understand that your science proficiency, or lack thereof, would not be a barrier to use. The book is meant to be used in after-school and out-of-school settings, as well as in the classroom, by teachers, parents, and nonprofit staff.

This book is the result of an unexpected but wonderful partnership, and we'd like to thank all the people who helped make it possible. First and foremost, thanks to President Bill Clinton, who had the insight to bring people together to create partnerships that build lasting change; Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari, whose idea of partnering an unusual storefront and a writing center has flourished into a global movement; TWC leadership, who got behind a sustained philanthropic commitment concerning an issue important not only to the success of their business but also to the nation at large; and all of the 826 volunteers and staff who created and piloted these lessons. Finally, thanks to you for picking up this book and believing that STEM and creative writing can help foster the next generation of creative thinkers, problem solvers, and innovators.

Have fun!

Tessie Topol

Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility

Time Warner Cable

Gerald Richards

Chief Executive Officer

826 National

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Welcome! Maybe you're here because you're a major STEM fan who can't get enough science, technology, engineering, and math. Or maybe you're a, let's say, more artistically inclined person, who, for some reason or other, suddenly has to teach some science. Whether you're in your element or over your head, you're in the right place. We've got twelve easy, fun, engaging lesson plans that combine the STEM fields and writing, and we're here to walk you through every step. As the catalyst said to the chemical compound, let's get started!

Our goal is, we hope, the same as yours: to inspire students to love the STEM fields and writing, too. One of the most exciting parts of science—of any kind of learning—is discovering something new. When students are exploring and figuring out how the world around them works, they are discovering something new to them—which is just as important and exciting as a Nobel Prize–winning discovery. Such an opportunity to explore and discover can ignite a passion for deeper learning.

This book's aim is to create moments of inspiration for students. We want students to be able to explore and discover, and to tap into their creativity along the way. We want to engage students who might not otherwise think of themselves as science types. And we want to highlight the many elegant connections between the arts and science.

So, how do you use this book?

Pick a lesson, any lesson. The different lessons each can stand alone. Together, they provide an opportunity for students to become deeply immersed in the practices of science and engineering. The lessons were designed and piloted in out-of-school environments, but we've adapted them to be used both in and out of the classroom. To make things easy, we've estimated the time needed for each section of every lesson, allowing educators to plan breaks in lessons based on their own unique time considerations. In addition, each lesson is indexed to both the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and the Next Generation Science Standards.

And if you're not a classroom teacher, there's plenty for you here, too. The lessons are designed to be taught by just about anyone: after-school educators; parents; and, yes, classroom teachers, from new to veteran. Each instructor will have a different level of experience. For those who want them, we provide some tips for teaching science. These tips are based on research, both cognitive science findings on how students learn as well as research that has looked at the impacts of instructional practices on students' learning. They're best practices that will bring a lot to your teaching.

We've also compiled a handy-dandy glossary: the Science-O-Pedia. Each entry covers the big, big ideas in the doing of science, from evidence and hypotheses to iteration and models. Read it first, or consult it just when needed.

Throughout this book, you will find opportunities for your students to question, explore, investigate, build, analyze, and create. They will be challenged to support their ideas with evidence and to communicate their ideas clearly. They will envision new worlds and explain how this one works. In the process, they will gain firsthand experience with revising: their writing, their scientific ideas, and the systems they have engineered.

Science and Writing

Writing is our bread and butter at 826, and it's integral to each lesson here. We cover two broad forms of writing: the documenting-your-work, sciencey kind of writing, and creative, imaginative Writing with a capital W.

Let's talk about the documenting-your-work kind of writing first. Documentation is an important piece of science, but admittedly it can seem boring to students who are in the middle of an exciting investigation. Why should your students do it? A few reasons:

It provides an anchor, allowing students to keep track of their ideas and how they are changing as they are confronted with new evidence.

It ensures students record what they have done and how they have done it, so that they, or someone else, can repeat it later.

It gets students to describe (both qualitatively and quantitatively) the results of each investigation.

Basically, until someone invents a way to broadcast the great ideas in our brains directly to the world, writing is a necessary and useful part of the scientific process. Maybe one of your students will be that inventor, but for now, like the rest of us, they'll use the written word.

As much as possible, we've tried to make the science writing assignments authentic (especially because we cannot capture all the different types of science writing here). Different formats are suggested in different lessons. Sometimes we ask for an instructor to capture students' ideas on chart paper. In other lessons we have data sheets (not worksheets) to scaffold the data collection and reflection for students. There are no lab reports—in classrooms, these are often prescriptive, and we want to provide students with ample space and flexibility to figure out what is important through their writing.

Now, about the creative, capital W kind of Writing: that also has a place here. Writing leverages the science theme of a lesson to give students the opportunity to explore different genres—students write science fiction, explore origin poems, write songs, tell tales of a journey by ship, hone their technical writing skills, and more. They use the science that they have learned in the lesson as source material for their writing, reinforcing their science learning.

Students also learn about things that science and writing have in common. Both are creative processes that involve trial and error. Just like in writing, scientists often revise their work—they design an experiment, but after trying it, they regularly have to change the mechanics of the experiment to get data that can be understood and interpreted. Clear communication is important in both science and writing. Writers share their work in writing workshops, with editors, and through publication; scientists share their work in conferences, on collaborative online forums, in popular science books, and in journals.

There is one big difference between creative writing and science, however. In creative writing you can invent worlds, and the impossible is possible (as long as you build a rich enough foundation for the story). In contrast, scientists can't invent evidence—that's fraud. Any scientific conclusions have to be backed up by evidence. Science and fiction only go together in science fiction; and we'll be doing a little of that here, too.

What Is STEM?

Science, technology, engineering, and math are often lumped together. There are good reasons for this—there's a lot of overlap between these fields, and collaboration between their respective professionals—but a clearer picture of each area can't hurt.

Science aims to expand human knowledge, and it does so by testing and falsifying hypotheses, and then building on theories about how the world works—figuring out everything from what the tiniest building blocks of the universe are, to exactly how much universe there is. Technology refers not only to actual physical equipment but also to its invention and the training of people to use it. Engineering is the use of scientific principles to solve problems—often by developing technology—including how to get across the country (in cars, over highways), and how to do so more conveniently and safely (robot drivers). Mathematics, and its analysis of the relationships between quantities, underpins all of the above. (This usually refers to applied mathematics, which includes branches of calculus, logic, and statistics. The many, many branches of pure or theoretical math, however, which develop mathematical understanding for its own sake, continue to find practical use in -science, engineering, and technology.)

Like we said, most of these fields overlap. Developing the technology that powers the graphics in Pixar movies and PlayStation games requires some pretty complicated abstract math—matrices and quaternions. And a lot of the most exciting research in particle physics depends on a marvelous feat of engineering—the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator (or atom smasher) seventeen miles around. These days, the STEM professionals who are proficient across disciplines are the ones doing some of the most exciting work.

And wow are we jazzed about that. But we also believe that STEM education needs to be even more interdisciplinary. It needs to include the arts; it needs to be STEAM.

Throughout much of history, it was. Although we think of science and art as being very different—in fact, opposite—disciplines now, that wasn't always the case. During the Renaissance, for instance, painters belonged to the same trade guild as physicians and apothecaries, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali. It's no coincidence that this was the period when both art and science saw some of their greatest advances, particularly in the realm of anatomical drawings, which required talent in both areas.

Today, iterative STEM processes are essential in art and design, and a lot of the creativity traditionally associated with the arts is necessary for STEM as well. By bridging the false art-versus-science dichotomy with STEAM, not only do we help students cultivate important skills in different fields, but also we help students with an affinity for one subject or another discover much more that they can be engaged and successful in.

Best of all, when STEM and writing are combined, students actually learn better. Research has shown that students grasp STEM concepts faster, and remember them longer, when they learn them not as rote facts, but through a story. Stories stimulate parts of the brain that straight memorization doesn't, and when we use them, we can harness more brain power. Cool!

Science Teaching

If you're new to teaching STEM subjects—or even if you're an old hand—you may find the following tips useful (we certainly do!). These best practices are based on research and results, and we've found them to be enormously helpful.

Let Discovery Motivate Learning

We started by discussing the power of discovery. We want to reemphasize that here. The decision not to front-load lessons with content or vocabulary was deliberate. We know that leading with discovery is contrary to practice that has been promoted in schools for the past several years. It is, however, very much in line with the Next Generation Science Standards (2013) and A Framework for K–12 Science Education (2012). If you're not already doing it, we encourage you to give it a try.

Keep Your Hands in Your Pockets

In the 1980s researchers observed science classrooms and found a shocking disparity. When boys asked for help on an activity, the teacher was likely to give them some pointers and move on. When girls asked for help, the teacher, whether male or female, was likely to take over the materials and show them how to do it.¹

What are the implications of this? As this happens to a student repeatedly over her educational career, she comes to expect to be rescued, either consciously or subconsciously. In practice this means that girls learn that they do not need to struggle and persist to complete a task, as someone else will do it for them. Although this may make getting through school appear easier, it has some real downsides. In many cases the reward is greater for the struggle—you learn more, and you feel a stronger sense of accomplishment. Learning persistence is a valuable skill—one that will help any student be successful, not only in school but in work and in life in general. One very practical tip to prevent yourself from rescuing a student, of any gender, is to keep your hands in your metaphorical pockets as you circulate around the room. With this stance, you can still ask great questions to promote thinking and provide practical tips or instruction, but it ensures that all students will have the opportunity to complete their own work, in the process building skills in persisting through difficult challenges.

Questions Are the Answer

It's tempting to provide lots of information up front—giving students vocabulary words and telling them what they will see in the investigation they are about to complete. When we organize a lesson this way, we have taken away our students' chance to explore and discover something for themselves. Where is the excitement in that? Instead, ask questions like the following:

What have you tried? followed by What else could you try? (or, if the student is really stuck, Have you tried …?)

What did you observe or notice?

How do you think it works?

How do you know that? or Why do you think that? or What is your evidence for that?

What do you think will happen if you change X?

Why do you think that happens?

Can you think of any additional explanations for what you observed?

We would argue that answering your students' questions with questions is the intellectual equivalent of keeping your hands in your pockets. Both are hard to do. Both require students to struggle and persist. And both are worth the effort, as they can have a profound impact on students' learning.

What does this mean? It means that when a student asks, for example, Why does this happen? you pause and, rather than giving the answer, respond by asking something like, Why do you think that happens? There are benefits both for you as a teacher and for your students when you respond this way: you get the opportunity to hear students' thinking, to understand where they are in their understanding of a concept, and to help them put their new learning in the context of their prior understanding. You can use a series of questions to guide students, in effect scaffolding their thought process; you can also use questions to redirect students' thinking. This is a flexible strategy, too, one you can use in one-on-one, small group, and whole group settings.

The Power of Prior Knowledge, Ideas, and Experience

Humans have been building on their scientific knowledge for millennia, progressing from early findings like Fire hot! to the more advanced implications of string theory physics. It's a process that's taken thousands of years, and it can often be very hard for huge shifts in scientific thought to take hold. The transition from an Earth-centered (geocentric) view of the cosmos to a sun-centered (heliocentric) view is a great example of this shift. Placing Earth in the center of the cosmos is consistent with what we see when we look up at the sky. Earth appears fixed, and the sun appears to move around us. This view, that the earth was the center, took hold powerfully in the ancient world. Over time, astronomers made more and more detailed observations of the movement of celestial bodies relative to Earth. Despite the fact that these newer observations were not consistent with the geocentric model, that view held for more than 1,500 years. It took what is now called a revolution (the Copernican Revolution) for the heliocentric model to begin to gain acceptance (and resistance continued …).

Humans are stubborn, and when a scientific idea appears to contradict our own experience or our narrative about how the world works, it takes work to make sense of and integrate that new idea. This is as true for individuals as it is for societies.

All students arrive at the classroom with their own framework for how the world around them works. This framework is based on their prior knowledge and experiences—developed both in and out of classrooms. Students' ideas about the world can be both powerful and persistent—much like the geocentric theory of the cosmos. New ideas and knowledge are not incorporated into a student's framework overnight. And, much as early astronomers created more and more complicated models to make their data fit the existing geocentric model, students will also try to fit conflicting information into their existing framework. Sometimes shifting their thinking requires the equivalent of a scientific revolution.

Some concrete steps to support students as they develop their understanding of a concept and to help shift their thinking consist of the following:

Solicit students' prior knowledge. This step is helpful for both teachers and students: teachers gain insight into their students' current understanding, and students have a chance to articulate their thinking and identify questions they have about a topic. In addition, this process can build interest and engagement in a lesson. Finally, when done in a group setting, it gives students an opportunity to hear different ideas about the same topic, which in turn can further stimulate interest, raise additional questions, and help students begin to confront their assumptions. The lessons in this book use a variety of strategies to solicit prior knowledge.

Have students take a side.Creating scenarios in which students can wrestle with their ideas can help them see that their mental model for a phenomenon may need some revision. One way to do this is to have students make and document their predictions (state what they think will happen—take a side). To make a good prediction (or a more formal hypothesis), students need to synthesize their current understanding of a phenomenon and apply that knowledge to the investigation at hand. Following the experiment, they then need to analyze whether their results were consistent or inconsistent with their predictions, and come up with a revised explanation for the phenomenon. Another strategy is to use something called a discrepant event. Discrepant events have an unexpected, often puzzling outcome. In the lesson Tinfoil Shipbuilding, for example, we suggest including a pumice stone in the collection of objects that you use to demonstrate objects that float or sink. Pumice behaves unlike other rocks. It floats. This forces students to think about the reasons something might float or sink beyond, Well, it's a rock, and I know that rocks sink.

Save time for sense-making. Despite careful planning, science investigations often take longer than anticipated. As a result, what gets squeezed in many classrooms is time for students to make sense of the experience they have just had. This sense-making is, however, a critical piece of learning. It can occur in discussions with whole or small groups. In a discussion, the goal is for the instructor not to recap and tell the students what they should have learned, but rather to provide opportunities for the students to explain their current understanding and, even more important, share and build knowledge together. Note also that these discussions don't have to occur only at the end of a lesson—they can be integrated throughout. Sense-making can also happen through student writing, whereby students integrate and explain their new understanding of how or why a phenomenon occurs. There are examples of both sense-making discussions and sense-making writing in this book.

Mistakes Are Normal

Many students who have been in very prescriptive learning environments will want to know everything before they begin—every step they should take, even the conclusion they should reach. Quite a few would rather not start than possibly make a mistake. This approach is not conducive to scientific learning.

Science is all about learning by doing, and that includes making mistakes. Practicing scientists make mistakes all the time, and so will your students over the course of these lessons. You should turn these mistakes into teachable moments and help students learn what they can. If it seems like a procedure went wrong (which is likely to happen when students are doing something for the first time), it's at the very least an opportunity to improve the procedure. More than you'd expect, though, difficulty with a procedure opens the door to unexpected observations and new lines of inquiry. (Where would the world be if Alexander Fleming had berated himself and thrown out the petri dish he accidentally allowed to be contaminated with mold? We might not have the antibiotics we do today if he hadn't discovered penicillin.)

If a student's hypothesis turns out to be wrong, it can feel to him or her like an especially huge mistake, a failure. But very few predictions prove to be entirely correct. In fact, the goal is not to prove a hypothesis, but to test it. A hypothesis helps scientists articulate, This is where my thinking is now, so that they can ask good questions, learn more, and revise their thinking accordingly. There should be no stigma attached to being wrong—it's part of the process of learning what's right (as determined by the best information at the time). Always remind your students of this, and make your classroom a safe environment for mistakes and the wonderful learning that comes with them.

You must never feel badly about making mistakes, explained Reason -quietly, as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.

—Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Sesquipedalianism Masquerading as Erudition (or Long Words Dressed Up as Knowledge)

Science words are fun—long and complicated and like a secret language (more on this to come). Students and adults alike will often use science terms in a discussion, and we certainly want to encourage students to practice using these words, as this will ultimately build fluency. That said, we encourage you to challenge students when they introduce a science word, because it's important to be sure that everyone in the room understands what the word means, including the student who used the word in the first place. For example, many students will have heard of density (an important concept in Tinfoil Shipbuilding) and will know that it has a relationship to floating and sinking. A student may well respond to the question How do ships, which are really, really, really massive, float in water? by saying, It has to do with density. The student would be correct—it does have to do with density—but it is possible to give that answer without having any understanding of the concept of density. In this situation, and with almost all science words, we recommend saying to the student, Will you please clarify what you mean by density? That's an important concept, and we want to be sure that everyone in the room understands what you mean. If the student responds at this point that she can't really explain, don't make a big deal out of it; instead just point out that through the investigation, everyone will have a chance to explore the concept of density, and that the group can come up with a definition together later.

Science and Language Learning

The big science words just mentioned can make science learning very abstract, particularly when -science is taught through a lecture or a textbook. In these situations, students are confronted with lots of new vocabulary at once and have few hands-on opportunities to really connect with the words. Researchers have analyzed high school–level science textbooks and found that they frequently require students to master more vocabulary than is recommended for secondary school foreign language courses—meaning that ninth-grade biology has more vocab to learn than Spanish I.² Memorizing a word is very different from understanding a concept. We want students to understand concepts and in parallel learn how to effectively communicate them.

To this end, the lessons in this book provide rich opportunities to develop students' English language skills (both for those who learned English as a first language and for those who may be English language learners). Throughout the book you will find opportunities for your students to talk (both formally and informally), listen, and write. The concrete experiences students have with materials will help them develop their conceptual understanding of science topics while also providing a mental scaffold onto which they can attach the language that they practice in the workshops.

The Cat's Out of the Bag

Although we have designed these lessons to emphasize student discovery, there is always the chance that someone in the workshop will already know (or worse, will blurt out) the answer. It is important to view this situation as a positive one, as it presents a wonderful teachable moment in which the answer should be challenged. An answer has an air of finality to it—what's the point of continuing with the investigation if you already know the why? Yet in science, even when a researcher finds an answer, that answer often leads to further questions and subsequent investigations. Perhaps more relevant to working with students, though, is that the answer is often rife with assumptions or information that some but not all of the students in the workshop have access to (such as from a prior school experience). When students present an answer, follow up with them by asking questions like these:

How do you know? (I learned it in class doesn't count! See the next question.)

What is your evidence for that?

Is there an experiment you could do to test your idea?

Is that the only explanation?

A

Reviews for STEM to Story

[hopeevey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Goodreads FirstReads program gave me this book.

Stem to Story impressed me both with the mission of 826 National and by the interesting, flexible lesson plans. I even learned some pedagogy that's totally applicable to training people at my workplace :)