Join us for a hands-on, interactive workshop designed for elementary science educators who want to strengthen sensemaking in their classrooms. Led by elementary specialists and memberships of STEMteachersNYC’s leadership, Juliette Guarino Berg and Kate Macaulay, this session will explore how storylines, anchoring phenomena, text connections, and iterative modeling can deepen student understanding and engagement in science.

Using OpenSciEd units as model frameworks (Grade K Forces and Motion and the Grade 4 Energy Transfer: Collisions units – you can choose which to concentrate on) you will experience science learning in both student mode and teacher mode. In teacher mode, you will unpack the power of an anchoring phenomenon, how it sparks curiosity, surfaces students’ ideas and questions, and drives a coherent storyline across an entire unit. In student mode, you will step into the role of learners, engaging in the OpenSciEd Investigation Routine to gather evidence and develop models to answer questions, like “How can we move things to where we want them to go?” and “Why does an object’s motion change?” Using simple, everyday and found materials like boxes and balls, you will explore forces, motion, and/or collisions, and have time to collaborate with colleagues, revise your thinking, and engage in rich scientific discourse, experiencing firsthand the kind of joyful, sensemaking science we want for our students.

Whether or not you currently use OpenSciEd, this workshop will highlight the core elements of strong, equitable science instruction that transfer across curricula.