Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Looking for a fun way to bring evolution and adaptation to life in your science class? This Getting Nerdy fan-favorite is one of the BEST online games to demonstrate natural selection in action. Choose the initial traits for your population of adorable, sausage-bodied...
Dissection and Lab, Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Want to incorporate more outdoor science lessons in your urban classroom but lack the green space to do it? These 15 tips will have you and your kiddos slapping on the sunscreen and your sunglasses and heading into the great outdoors in no time! Use what...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Whether you are homeschooling, distance learning, online or at-home learning, we want to make sure we are supporting our educators and parents however we can. We’ve had tons of questions regarding how you can use the products you’ve already purchased from...
Classroom Management, Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Wanna walk a day in our shoes? Here’s what a day in the life of a Nerdy science teacher (aka Mel and Gerdy) looks like: 7:00 am: Arrive at school. Gather materials to be copied if needed. We loved raiding the copy machine for as long as we could each morning in...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
There have been SO many requests for us to detail out our year-long agenda – what order we teach lessons, how long a unit takes to teach, how much content is delivered, etc. These are all great questions, and we are so happy to be able to share with you our...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Task Cards… woohoo! They are the new go-to teaching tool for teachers and what most don’t know is that they make superb secondary study tools, too! They are versatile, easy print-and-go resources, and they can serve so many uses in your classroom. Here...
Classroom Management, Dissection and Lab, Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Differentiation… every instructional coach, administrator and professional development seminar’s favorite buzz word. It can be overwhelming, but it does’t necessarily mean that you need to call the school nurse for the defibrillator. Do these...
Dissection and Lab, Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Knock knock… Who’s there? Egg cell… Egg cell who? Egg-Cell-ent ideas for teaching cells! If you’re looking for some ideas to “cell” kids on your cells unit, these tips might be just what “eu” need… 🙂 Graphic...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Over the 12+ years that we have been teaching, we spent a lot of time searching for engaging websites to use in our lessons. We love to incorporate games, online labs, videos, and any other site that is both educational AND fun for our students (and us too!). Not to...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Word walls are SO important in today’s diverse schools. They make academic vocabulary visible to your students, exposing them daily to the words they need to succeed in class. Word walls are a necessary component to any classroom, but they can be tedious and...
Classroom Management, Interactive Notebooks, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Interactive Notebooks, INBs, ISNs… whatever you call them, they are proving to be THE MOST popular and talked about way to engage students in the classroom. We used our interactive notebooks from day one and we found that our students loved them because it was their...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
When we first started teaching, word walls existed as simple strips of paper, each with the current unit’s vocabulary terms, tacked to a bulletin board and left there for the entire unit – like that unfinished project you started last month, right?! Since...
Classroom Management, Dissection and Lab, Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Welcome back to school! Whether you’re new to the classroom or a seasoned vet, the first week is ALWAYS nerve-wracking, conjuring up nightmares of dissections gone awry and showing up to work in only your lab coat… yikes! We know all too well how hard those...
Classroom Management, Interactive Notebooks, Pedagogy and Differentiation
In the summer of 2009, we had the most fortunate luck to land a professional development workshop that literally changed our lives. That summer, we spent two weeks on Skidaway and Sapelo Islands, studying the coastal Georgia ecosystems alongside ecologists and UGA...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
We’re so glad that vocabulary instruction has moved well beyond #writethedefinition. We’ve all read brain-based research. We’ve studied Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. We’ve seen it first-hand in the classroom – kids all learn in different ways. The vocabulary...
Dissection and Lab, Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a newbie to science lab stations, let us fill you in on why they should be a staple lesson for your curriculum – and why making them CROSS-CURRICULAR by using STEAM science lab stations will help your kids to transcend...
Dissection and Lab, Interactive Notebooks, Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
What happens when your school budget won’t allow for enough dissection specimen for your class, or you have a student who refuses to participate in dissection for personal or religious reasons? What do you do when a student misses an entire week of school, and it just...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
When it comes to test taking, middle and high school students have a lot on the line. They worry…alot. They have concern about how their scores compare to their peers, how they rank with their GPA, how it affects the classes they get into in years to come, its...
Lesson Plans, Pedagogy and Differentiation
Some might call them cootie catchers, to others they are fortune tellers, but to US, they are an amazing way to review classroom material! These are hands-on study tools that get secondary students active and engaged in their learning plus they’re really fun to...
