My resource for this week is Explore Learning Gizmos. This website offers a wide array of scientific simulations that fit perfectly with Georgia's middle grades standards. There are simulations for 8th-grade physical science topics, like Boyle's and Charles' Law, stoichiometry, and unit conversions. There's also earth science and life science topics covered ( Earthquake lab, plant simulations, and senses stimulation). This is a great resource for middle school science teachers because it offers content-area literacy through an interactive simulation. Students are able to form questions and hypotheses before-hand, complete the simulation, then analyze and summarize their results. While it might not be a direct reading of a text, the students are still putting their reading skills to practice by following instructions, forming questions, using background knowledge to hypothesize, and analyzing their results. These simulations can help expand a student's scientific literacy. "Scientific literacy means that a person can ask, find, or determine answers to questions derived from curiosity about everyday experiences. It means that a person has the ability to describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena" (National Academies Press). When learning science, it's not something that can just be read, it has to be done. By that I mean a student will absorb material and have an all-around better understanding of a topic if they read about it and experiment, question, discuss and problem solve. These interactive resources facilitate a complete understanding of topics and offer an easy way for teachers to explain material in a different way. Explore Learning is a great resource for math educators as well. They offer a wide variety of simulations related to math concepts ranging from grades 6-12. (Word Count: 273)

Click the picture to access Gizmos

Citation:
Read "National Science Education Standards" at NAP.edu. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/read/4962/chapter/4

Source: https://www.explorelearning.com/index.cfm?method=Controller.dspFreeGizmos

This chapter made me look at reading through the perspective of my students and realize how important it is to have prior knowledge of a subject in order to fully understand a text. As teachers, it's easy to look at a reading passage discussing something in our content area and think "oh this is easily comprehensible" because we've been studying those subjects intensively for a number of years, but to our students, this is new material. According to cognitive researchers, "human being store our knowledge in mental patterns called schemata. It helps to think of a schema as a web that stores and connects all the information in your mind related to a given topic" (Subject Matters, 32). This concept of schemata is the key to understanding and it's our job as teachers to build our student's schema up about particular subjects, like plant cells, The Civil War, probability, etc. Giving a student a reading before adequately preparing them for the content the reading covers is somewhat useless and they'll likely just read over the words without truly understanding it's meaning.  So what do we do to avoid this mindless reading? We prepare our students by having class discussions, showing pictures and diagrams, watching videos, drawing models, and answering questions. Then, we assign a reading that they can use their background knowledge to comprehend, allowing the passage to connect new ideas for them and guide their curiosity. (Word count: 237)

This book is called Never Touch A Dinosaur, by Rosie Greening. The book shows many different types of dinosaurs with all kinds of colors and textures. It also allows the reader to feel the different textures of the dinosaurs. It was a really cute and short book that allows interaction which was unique.

Word Count: 53