eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
Provides an introduction to constructivist physics with classroom examples illustrating how children construct knowledge. Shows how to promote children's scientific reasoning by engaging them in active experimentation.
This teacher’s guide provides the background information, STEM concepts, and strategies needed to successfully implement an early STEM curriculum (Ramps and Pathways) with young children, ages 3–8. R&P actively engages young children in designing and building ramp structures using wooden cove molding, releasing marbles on the structures, and observing what happens. Children use logical-mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills as they explore science concepts related to motion, force, and energy. This guide helps teachers to: Structure and organize an engaging STEM learning environment. Understand and promote logical-mathematical and scientific thinking during investigations. Promote social settings that enhance communication, cooperation, and collaboration. Make the necessary accommodations and modifications for diverse learners. Integrate STEM concepts and skills with other content areas. Align teaching and learning with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Assess STEM learning using formative and summative assessments. Establish adult learning communities to support ongoing professional development. Help children develop habits and behaviors that contribute to positive attitudes toward STEM. This one-of-a-kind resource uses a newly created Inquiry Teaching Model (ITM) as the conceptual framework and devotes specific attention to the importance of an inclusive, social, STEM learning environment in which children are free to collaborate, take risks, and investigate within the context of exploratory and constructive play. “This book is a must for all concerned with the education of young children. Using ramps and pathways as an exciting and stimulating example of how to engage children in rich STEM experiences, this team of highly knowledgeable and skilled researchers and practitioners draw from their deep and extensive backgrounds to present a clear and comprehensive view of the current landscape of inquiry-based STEM teaching and learning for young children. It is a book that can and should inform both policy and practice.” —Karen Worth, Elementary Education Department, Wheelock College
Children are intrigued by moving objects, even more so when they can engineer the movement. This volume in the STEM for Our Youngest Learners Series uses Ramps and Pathways as a context to provide children ages 3-8 with opportunities to engage in STEM every day. Ramps and Pathways is a meaningful and fun way for children to develop engineering habits of mind as they explore concepts in force and motion, properties of objects, and how an object's properties affect its movement. In the process, children develop spatial thinking that is essential for future careers in STEM. The text also offers guidance for arranging the physical, intellectual, social-emotional, and promotional environments of a classroom to embrace the natural integration of literacy learning. Each volume in this series includes guidance for forming partnerships with families and administrators that support STEM learning, vignettes showing educators and children engaging in inquiry learning, tips for selecting materials, modifications and accommodations for diverse learners, ways to establish adult learning communities that support professional development, and more. Book Features: Alignment with both the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework (ELOF) and the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices, with specific descriptions of how those science and engineering practices in Ramps and Pathways look and feel in Pre-K-2 classrooms. Examples of how to integrate literacy learning in a meaningful way. Descriptions of how the open-ended nature of ramps and pathways aligns with the Universal Design for Learning Framework (UDL). Guidance to help teachers anticipate and plan for all children to become purposeful, motivated, resourceful, knowledgeable, strategic, and goal-directed about learning. Examples of how to stage, introduce, and support children's designs to develop engineering habits of mind (systems thinking, optimism, creativity, communication, collaboration, attention to ethical considerations). A meaningful and healthy context to grow children's executive function skills (EFs), including inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility.
Training for and pursuing a career in science can be treacherous for women; many more begin than ultimately complete at every stage. Characterizing this as a pipeline problem, however, leads to a focus on individual women instead of structural conditions. The goal of the book is to offer an alternative model that better articulates the ideas of agency, constraint, and variability along the path to scientific careers for women. The chapters in this volume apply the metaphor of the road to a variety of fields and moments that are characterized as exits, pathways, and potholes. The scholars featured in this volume engaged purposefully in translation of sociological scholarship on gender, work, and organizations. They focus on the themes that emerge from their scholarship that add to or build on our existing knowledge of scientific work, while identifying tools as well as challenges to diversifying science. This book contains a multitude of insights about navigating the road while training for and building a career in science. Collectively, the chapters exemplify the utility of this approach, provide useful tools, and suggest areas of exploration for those aiming to broaden the participation of women and minorities. Although this book focuses on gendered constraints, we are attentive to fact that gender intersects with other identities, such as race/ethnicity and nativity, both of which influence participation in science. Several chapters in the volume speak clearly to the experience of underrepresented minorities in science and others consider the circumstances and integration of non-U.S. born scientists, referred to in this volume as international scientists. Disaggregating gender deepens our understanding and illustrates how identity shapes the contours of the scientific road.
Children are intrigued by switches that power a light source and by items that reflect light and sparkle, and they take notice of personal shadows cast on the playground. An understanding of light and shadow is crucial to many STEM fields, including astronomy, biology, engineering, architecture, and more. This book shows teachers how to engage children (ages 3-8 ) with light and shadow in a playful way, building an early foundation for the later, more complex study of this phenomena and, ultimately, for children's interest in professions within the STEM fields. The text offers guidance for arranging the physical environment of classrooms, integrating literacy learning and investigations, and building partnerships with administrators. Each volume in the STEM for Our Youngest Learners Series includes examples of educators and children engaging in inquiry learning, guidance for selecting materials and arranging the learning environment, modifications and accommodations for diverse learners, support for establishing adult learning communities, and more.
The college degree is considered the best ticket to a rewarding career and the middle class. But many say the traditional degree pathway is failing to meet the nation's postsecondary education and training needs. As a result, a growing number of colleges are partnering with employers -- or brokers who make those connections -- and noncollege education providers to offer alternative credential pathways. This is the focus of Inside Higher Ed's new special report, On-Ramps and Off-Ramps: Alternative Credentials and Emerging Pathways Between Education and Work.
With talent shortages looming over the next decade, what can companies do to attract and retain the large number of professional women who are forced off the career highway? By documenting the successful efforts of a group of cutting-edge global companies to retain talented women and reintegrate them if they’ve already left, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps answers this critical question. Working closely with companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, General Electric and others, author Sylvia Ann Hewlett identifies what works and why. Based on firsthand experience with these companies, along with extensive data that provides the most comprehensive and nuanced portrait of women's career paths, this book documents the actions forward-thinking companies must take to reverse the female brain drain and ensure their access to talent over the long term.
Feel confident and competent when it comes to choosing and implementing the most appropriate technology tools for your early childhood classroom! Whether you are a technology enthusiast looking for new ideas and guidance about developmentally appropriate practices, or you are new to the idea of using technology with young children, this book is for you. Digital Decisions provides everything you need to make your own technology plan based on your experiences and beliefs, the needs of the children, the context of your curriculum and the resources available to you. This no-nonsense, jargon-free guide will help you evaluate the tools and opportunities technology has to offer and integrate them into your early childhood classroom so you can offer real-life, hands-on, interactive activities to children. A reference every childhood program will want to have, Digital Decisions is brimming with charts, resources, and an array of activities that maximize technology as an interactive learning tool. Each chapter provides supporting guidance to make technology most effective for those working with children who are dual language learners or may have special needs.
Everyday STEAM for the Early Childhood Classroom offers a rich, rewarding pathway for early childhood educators integrating the arts into STEM instruction across ages 0–8. Science, technology, engineering, and math are mainstays of early childhood curricula, but young learners can have even more engaging experiences in these subjects with the inclusion of the arts. In this comprehensive resource, early childhood educators will learn key principles for the effective teaching of STEAM in their classrooms and be guided to leverage their existing knowledge and strengths toward meaningful learning opportunities. Packed with hands-on resources, ready-to-use teaching tools, and developmentally appropriate practices, this book is ideal for in-service and pre-service educators ready to explore and experiment with STEAM.
